I have worked in buildings low on meeting space where middle managers would do something similar, but with meeting rooms. You can always find a meeting if you abuse the system to 'claim' one room as your own for enough hours of the week.

Hoarding in a situation of some scarcity is common behavior, and makes the problem worse. You can't assume people will behave the same way when a resource's availability changes. And this is why we go from plentiful to very scarce so very quickly, with very little in between