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Comment by gautamdivgi | Hacker News Reader

Is RTO being driven by the government? There suddenly seems to be huge push this year and not much in 2022. Allegedly commercial real estate is something that many banks have exposure to and will not be solved unless RTO is implemented. This is just my hypothesis and obviously correlation isn't causation.

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In Canada's capital Ottawa, this has been pushed for by the municipal government. Office workers downtown were what kept most of the overpriced, mediocre, restaurants, franchises and coffee shops afloat. These places are often the only convenient option for office workers. Nobody would ever go to these by choice - they are only ever open 9-5 Monday to Friday - so they needed the government to step in and force their customers back to the office.

This is a really interesting question to me because one can’t help but notice there are entities which are going to suffer immense pain if remote work continues.

Specifically, anyone holding the bag of commercial real estate - particularly in high CoL cities.

Edit: I strongly suspect there is a story here because if you happened to be holding that bag you would lobby, lie, cheat, steal, whatever you needed to do to try and get out from under that impending doom.

I don't know the way I see it some big companies decide to try it and every C-level that sees the article follows. Seems like that's more likely in my mind at least. There was a game about this for Amiga written in 1991.

I think this is what's happening. It's just follow-the-leader. "Apple and Google are doing it, it must be a good idea." I've had no official internal justification.

>There was a game about this for Amiga written in 1991.

Lots of games released that year. Link Hall Of Light[0] for the game?

0. http://hol.abime.net/

I don't think it's totally driven by the govt, but it's driven by the companies that want to preserve certain benefits and influence in the govt.

Their interests just happen to be against, literally everyone else in terms of a full reversion.

There is certainly worry that as lease contracts expire, the combination of higher interest rates and vacant offices will create huge losses for real estate developers, and these can cause a cascading domino effect of further losses.

How the communication flows from the government or RE developers to executives is beyond my understanding, but it looks like there is not much willingness to rethink how corporate office space can be used in other ways, and more willingness to just go back to the status quo.

I have seen RTO being driven by the muni. There is an immediate risk for urban decay as all the secondary effects of thousands of people coming to place for 9+ hours a day disappear.

Lots of city tax revenue vanished when people stopped coming into work.

That's a silly reach. There are many factors but I doubt any of them is the government.

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