The chain is a little longer, and a little less intentional, IME.

CRE firm lobbies local politicians that remote work is killing Main Street.

Local politicians attach tax breaks/incentives for companies with office workers.

Companies mandate RTO to save some tax money while unwittingly being a toadie for commercial real estate.

The key difference being that the people mandating RTO aren't biased because of their own investments in CRE.

I do think there's probably a lot of political pressure on employers to not just abandon downtowns. And some do outright own a lot of real estate which puts them in a somewhat difficult position of probably writing down investments. But my first-hand observation in that employers who lease are just not renewing in at least a number of cases.

Amazon does own (what feels like) half of downtown Seattle. I think in this case they do have a strong 1st party incentive.

> Local politicians attach tax breaks/incentives for companies with office workers.

Has that actually happened?

Certainly tax breaks related to local employment have been a common thing in the past. Whether this is related to any current RTO activity I have no idea.