>the unspoken reasoning for these back-to-work efforts is to stave off a western financial collapse in commercial real estate. If I asked some superintelligent

>the unspoken reasoning for these back-to-work efforts is to stave off a western financial collapse in commercial real estate. If I asked some superintelligent AI to create the most wrong reddit theory possible, I think it might be this one. Large companies (small ones too) have to spend money to give you a desk. Some will even go so far as to put a price tag on it, that facilities cost is $x per square foot or whatever. If they can offload that cost onto their employee, that's win/win. Some real estate companies might do bad if that happens... even if none of their leases are going unrenewed, it puts downward pressure on prices. But those companies have almost no overlap with the ones doing RTO. And I've yet to see that people like Jeff Bezos or whoever have any significant holdings in real estate (even if they did, the positives of remote would outweigh the negatives, and you'd just see them divest). There are winners and losers in a remote-work world, and the people who would win are or should be happy to let the losers lose. Something else is going on. >a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities Mayoral politicians are so powerless I can't come up with a witty way to describe it. They're Vice President-levels of worthless (and not the Dick Cheney sort either). They have no influence or mojo to swing this. If this would hurt large cities (and it might), then those cities will just be hurt.