Oh, I am so here for "housing theory of everything" comments! That is, in my other comment on this post, precisely my "interest in local politics".

Working on fixing our housing shortage has felt extremely meaningful to me.

I'd like to find some of that idealism in software again.

There are current efforts along these lines! For example, permitting is a huge bottleneck - software could be part of the solution (carefully and thoughtfully integrated, of course).

Disclosure: I work at govstream.ai - we work in this space [we're hiring!]