I’ll second King’s contrivance as a sweet spot. We agonized over where to land and I’m thrilled with our spot. The forest land surrounding us is just heaven. But there are other excellent neighborhoods, we also liked hickory ridge, but KC nudged it out for access to everything and walkability.

Columbia in general has a little bit of everyone but intention. IMO avoid the top of the top of the top schools if your kid is worried about finding friends or has some anxiety issues. Strangely, some of the “less good” schools may have more resources for you.

400-500k isn’t a terrible budget and if you’re willing to do a little upgrading on your own you’re in single-family house range, maybe barely.

Look up Columbia on misc. best places to live lists, they’re not inaccurate IME.

Agree, you have to be picky to optimize for walkability. I’m in King’s Contrivance and it’s highly walkable/bikable here. Can get to the town center in 20 min by bike, village center with most of what I need in 3 min.

If you’re on Facebook, there are buy nothing groups for most parts of Columbia, requests on there do really well especially for kid’s clothes

I like Clarksville, too, but I like the river more down this way and housing at half the cost.

Having agonized over where to live in Columbia… there’s a ton of excellent places but wow is it hard to beat KC

My neck of the woods (pun on the fact that there’s tons of excellent wooded areas in KC)