Look at Cave Creek, just North of Scottsdale. I'm right on the border of the two, and I commuted to Sky Harbor for years. 40 minutes each way, on average. I love it up here, because it's easy to escape up to the high country. Pretty affordable, too.
This.
Cave Creek and Carefree are nice places to live. Much of northeast Mesa is nice, too. There are nice pockets all over the Phx metro area, from Gilbert to Glendale. North Scottsdale, Troon, etc. are nice but way too upper crust for my tastes.
Phoenix isn't all that bad. The summers can be tough, but you don't have to shovel sunshine to get out of your driveway in the mornings. Plenty of great hiking in and around the city, and the topopgraphy is so diverse that you can be in oak-studded grasslands, alpine meadows, desert bighorn territory, or 10,000-foot mountains blanketed in blue spruce & aspens within a 3-hour drive, depending on which direction you head out from downtown Phx.
