Hey friends.

Does anyone live (or know of anyone living) in the Lexington, SC area? Would they recommend the area, how are the schools, are people nice, etc?

10/14/2014 3:58:32 PM

I worked in Columbia for 2.5 years, lived in West Columbia & frequented Lexington every now and then.

It's a typical suburban bedroom community, not too different from Cary. As far as I know, the schools there are pretty good (I don't have kids, so it's just hearsay) and I think they've built quite a few in the last few years to accommodate the explosive population growth seen over the last 10-15 years. Overall I think people are generally nice, most of the southern variety but I think there is a decent diversity through the town/housing communities.

With that said, I probably wouldn't recommend the area to anyone. First of all, it is SC and anything outside of Charleston & parts of Greenville/mountain terrain/Hilton Head is very unappealing IMHO. The traffic in Lexington is absolutely horrendous, especially during school/rush hours. I've known people to sit in traffic for well over an hour 20% of the time just to go from Lexington to downtown Columbia (approx. 10 miles). SCDOT is very slow (and probably underfunded due to low gas tax) to catch up with explosive population growth. It's also quite difficult to get around the metro area as most people tend to use the interstates (26, 20, 77) too frequently to get around (There's a reason the 26-20 interchange is called Malfunction Junction).

Columbia itself has quite a few rivers which are great for water activities & the few trails that line some of it. The zoo is probably better than the NC Zoo, though it's smaller in size. Other than that, there really isn't much to do around the area. It gets hot as balls in the summer, and thunderstorms can dump a ton of rain without hardly moving sometimes in the summer. Winters are quite mild (which was nice), and frozen precipitation tends to be uncommon.

If you have any more questions, just ask! I hate to be more negative than positive, but I just didn't have a great experience there and was more than happy to get out of there a year ago.

10/14/2014 4:27:02 PM

No that's awesome, I appreciate the information. It's good to have an insider's view before we make our decision.

10/20/2014 3:11:47 PM