I wonder what the breakdown would look like flying an employee in on a $250 airline ticket and renting a conference room for a day vs paying for an office that sits unused half the month?

I think it would also be interesting to see what ends up happening when cal hsr is finished. Now you can live in merced and could end up in sac, la, sf, san diego, anaheim, population and job centers all over the state really for a lot less hassle and cost of flying. Trains are generally more spacious and comfortable for getting some work done on the laptop as well, maybe you can bake the train commute into your working hours since you'd essentially be in an office that moves at 220mph around the state.

It costs a lot more than that. Airline tickets are routinely 500-700$ (eg. SF-NY or SF-Miami). Then you need a couple of nights of hotels on top. Add 2-3 meals per day. And suddenly you are looking at 1000-1500$ per person. For a team of 40-50, that's ~50K budget for 1 day of productive work.

Now compare that to an office lease where you can get. At an avg density of 200 sqft/person[1], you'd need 10,000 sqft. You can get that for ~500K$/yr[2]. You use that for 10 times in a given year and you are breaking even.

[1] https://aquilacommercial.com/learning-center/how-much-office...

[2] https://www.loopnet.com/search/commercial-real-estate/san-fr...

No go because they need to "manage" this. Everything needs to be synchronized, people need to be aligned. All the busy work needs to go somewhere.