You might be surprised if you don't require living in a highly walkable downtown core. In many places, such as Eastern Massachusetts, the jobs are pretty distributed around the area; it's only fairly recently that tech jobs have started to be located in the city at all. And you get an hour outside of Boston and there's quite a bit of housing in the $300-$400K range in many towns. That's not Midwest cheap but it's not $1.5M for a teardown either.

Of course, Cambridge and many areas of Boston proper are quite expensive (as are some of the tonier suburbs like Concord).

Silicon Valley is a bit unusual in that you can't really escape from high prices, in spite of being suburban sprawl, because of the geographical constraints.