I worked at a place with a historic, beautiful, downtown office. It was great ... for a while. Then they expanded but the location could not. My enjoyment dropped rapidly once we were five to a desk. The question of remote work came up and upper management was heavily invested in on site ICs. And this around the time they promoted some semi-remote folks to be our managers. It was weird. Possibly some trust issues from past contractors.

EDIT: Forgot to mention they did specifically call out the expense of the location and parking privileges as a reason to disallow remote work.

The worst time I had was when I got to manage a team of 5 at a remote location. All 5 guys were sitting together. There was only one conference room equipped with videoconference gear. I tried maintaining at least one meeting a week but it had to be booked a lot in advance and I was frequently preempted by higher management because this was the only one room. Usually at the last moment (and I had once been evicted in the middle of the meeting).

There was no budget for me to visit them at the office so all in all I saw them in person twice. Not twice a month or even twice a year. Twice. Total.

It’s likely less costly to the decision maker than admitting a mistake and changing course would be.

Google has signed like 16 year leases in some offices and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into them already. For the playa vista office alone at least.

You act as though people are rational actors.