There isn’t a mechanism to “force” anyone. With few exceptions, companies lease their office space. A few companies may try to force employees to sit in a leased office to feed the sunk cost fallacy, but that won’t last. Only the most incompetent management will renew leases to support employees who don’t want to be there in the first place.

The actual solution is large scale conversion of commercial real estate to residential. Some people like being downtown, with population density, ability to walk to lots of restaurants, etc. And converting ~60% of office space to residential will drive costs down, reducing financial motivations to move out of the city.

Property owners are fucked, and will see much lower returns than they expected. Some will go bankrupt. Buildings financed by banks may see foreclosure/auction, and some banks will lose money. That’s what interest is for.

But eventually these buildings will have new owners that bought them at appropriate prices, and new purposes as residences, and downtown will probably be an even better place to live, with a population that doesn’t go home to the suburbs every night.

tl;dr: probably a good thing for downtown; invest in office-to-apartment conversion companies.