Honestly this is a bit ridiculous. If making 500k as an L6 isn't good enough for you maybe you should be working on projects that provably bring your company revenue?
There’s a place where you can work on things that don’t generate revenue but are morally/technically interesting: it’s called “academia”.
That's a pretty cheap way of looking at yourself.
Return building rights to land owners and the problem will be solved. The insane thing is the way coalitions of existing owners conspire to reduce supply and thus increase the values of their assets, and the rest of us just go, "Oh, okay, that's cool, that you're conspiring to embeggar the rest of us."
My old landlords had average non-tech jobs in the 80s, bought a house for under 100k. At some point they used it to buy a second house, and another, and another. Now they own 30+ houses and rent each for 4-7k/mo.
Old next door neighbor's house was owned by her dad, he was a public works employee and owns 6 houses in the bay area now.
Neighbors on the other side were an older couple with adult kids and multiple rental properties in Fremont. They bought a house for their adult son outright before we moved.