Portland and Seattle are lovely and have many walkable neighborhoods. SF is expensive, and so is the entire bay really, but Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville are very walkable and ever so slightly more affordable compared to being on the Peninsula itself. Many of the Central Valley cities are unwalkable car based hell holes, and so is much of SoCal for that matter, but I have friends who live in Sacramento and they won't shut up about how happy they are to go car free and how the city is dramatically expanding bike infrastructure. It's very neighborhood dependent still, but I don't see why they'd be lying to me about it and they did indeed sell their cars in favor of ebikes, so the proof is in the pudding there.