Why not VCs?

Every startup I've known that's attempting RTO is definitely doing so from VC pressure. Of course the announcement from the leadership will never phrase it that way, but when leadership suddenly has some inspiration about the value of working in proximity immediately after a board/investor meeting you can be sure where that inspiration comes from.

Most recently IPO'd startups are also strongly influenced by small numbers of institutional investors that have major sway in decision making. All of those investors have broad portfolios and have a keen interest in keeping commercial real-estate healthy.

At a certain level that pressure comes from the CEOs themselves since they likely have a large number of assets (and/or the company itself does) tied up in commercial real estate. All of those mega-campuses are real estate investments and have a certain value on the books. If the commercial real estate market crashes, the value of those assets does as well.

That doesn't make sense unless investors own the same building that the company in question is renting office space in.

Not necessarily. More people downtown means more people going out for lunch

Tech VCs don’t invest in restaurants. Actually one of the major sources of tension between tech and “communities” is that tech offices usually have onsite amenities, including lunch, so that employees don’t patronize local businesses much.

come on, I just listed one second order effect, if restaurants in area succeed that increases property values of entire area

For this to be a tangible benefit for any particular investor, a lot of unlikely conditions must be met.

People working from home also go out (or order in) for lunch

I think in some places companies got tax breaks predicated on having so many people commute and spend money in a city or etc?

Basically this... though generally the tax breaks just require local hires within a city or county. Most of them don't have office mandates attached.

It seems like they didn't do a comprehensive risk analysis. So why must the employees who had no say in the matter directly pay for the incompetence?

Pretty sure rich people network is pretty strong.

Theres a lot of incest with capital and property ownerahip. Id bet plenty of VCs park money in real estate and consequentially lease it back. Similar to how movie productions "lose" money