Walkable does not imply expensive. If it does, that's a (local government) policy choice.

To my constant dismay, that's the government choice in much of the US these days.

In the US walkable means either unsafe or very expensive or occasionally both.

Changing this would be very challenging because we have also decided that real estate should be an investment. This means it should always go up, which orients urban planning toward making housing unaffordable. The primary role of the car is driving further away to escape rent extraction, which is sharply at odds with making cities walkable.

The only way to have a walkable city that is affordable is to get those crime rates up. Maybe that’s what SF is trying to do. But even that doesn’t work if you have people like OpenAI locating there and making people work in the office and paying $300k+ entry level.

I'm eagerly awaiting the urban planning renaissance in Memphis, then (highest violent crime rate for a large city in the US). Though violent crime is dropping over time, there was a resurgence following COVID. I couldn't find any statistics on whether that is sustained or has since started to decline.

In CA it is.

I am not aware of a single walkable city or town in the US that is not expensive.