Maybe move to a different city where people aren't clueless?
If the NIMBYs want everybody who wasn't alive the last time housing prices were "cheap" in Seattle to GTFO, I suppose that's the only thing we can do. Because there's no damn way I'm scrimping and saving to pay seven figures to someone whose sole contribution to that property was that they were born before I was and got there first to stand in the way of everyone else.
Some of the sticker price of your not-cheap house is the quality of the house itself, and its desirable location.
Some is a cynical campaign to prevent owners of land from building more housing on land which, again, they own, through political maneuvering.
I would assert that your right to buy what you want implies their right to build what they want on the land they have bought, within reasonable limits, that the zoning regime in big West Coast cities is nothing resembling reasonable, and that we should change it so that those cities can have more, cheaper housing.
If you disagree, that's fine, that's democracy, but I consider you a NIMBY, an authoritarian busybody who handwaves about "neighborhood character" to disguise the fact that they feel entitled to prevent a lot owner from putting up a four-story building with eight condos in it.
The people I know that are living there are frustrated with bad governance too, but they feel a lot better when they see what's going on in California.
I'd love for a California city to be as forward thinking and reality-based as Seattle, making policy primarily o enable the good of all instead of transferring wealth from those with less to those that own land.
Seattle and Jersey City are great. The Squamish Nation in Vancouver is also doing AMAZING governance, they should just return all Vancouver government to Squamish Nation, IMHO. That is a land-back movement that would greatly increase human happiness.