Right now, that budget would allow you to buy in almost any area around here.
What I would look into is HOW he's going to commute to N. Beach. I'm not that familiar with that part of the city because it's not that easy to get to on public transportation. Honestly, we live in Oakland, and have been to the city less than a dozen times in 6 years because of the traffic. If we can't get somewhere via BART or the ferry (with a decent walk), we don't go to the city, period. I haven't driven to the city since I moved here.
I'd start working backwards, look up where he'll be working, find the bus routes to the BART, then start looking at the BART routes, and find somewhere along there. If there's not an easy bus route to BART, is there an easy bus route to the ferry (this limits your options, but is still better than driving everyday, IMO).
And then it depends on what you're looking for. "Cheap" real estate is all over the place around here. To get a little land though, you need to go through the Caldecott tunnel for the most part. Lafayette, Orinda, Canyon area, or even further out to Danville, Walnut Creek and the outlying areas. My contact with those areas have been fairly limited to people I worked with when I worked out there, but crunchiness was not really common that I found. For lots of crunchy, you'd want to stay closer in, Alameda, Berkeley or SF itself.
Another thing to consider though is earthquakes. While I would love to live in Alameda in theory, the fact that it is mostly built on landfill and therefore unstable in a big quake means I'll drool from our bedrock foundation in Oakland.
Hope some of that helps.
