Columbia is Awful
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6/11/2019
I lived in CoMo for three years. I've lived in several types of cities and small towns, including two other college towns. Columbia is the most horrible place that I have ever lived. When you take away the college students and other people temporarily living there, you are left with the racist, bigoted townsfolk. Nearly every day there is some old white person protesting/praying outside the Planned Parenthood (they don't even provide abortions at that location anymore). They just sit there, wasting their time looking like fools. Someone actually set fire to the building in protest one night. They clearly have surveillance cameras, not a smart move.
The city can't do anything right. I have never lived in a place where you put the garbage/recycling bags and cardboard on the curb instead of in a bin. On the day of trash collection the whole neighborhood has garbage everywhere because it gets blown around. It looks terrible. The city says that switching to bins would force them to lay off some staff, but then they fail to pick up recycling and claim that they are short staffed. Get bins or get enough staff - pick one! One winter we had almost 2 feet of snow drop within 24-30 hours. It took over 2 days for the city to finally plow our street once. I've never seen a city take that long to make ONE plow pass on a residential road.
The people there have no idea how to drive in winter conditions either. Actually, they don't care about traffic laws in general. Most of the neighbors were not friendly and left their dog's feces on other people's lawns. Only my black neighbors were friendly, the other white people just stared at me from their houses. Very weird. If you like overweight racist rednecks and ignorant college kids, then you'll like Columbia. Mizzou is also a joke. I worked there - your tuition money would be better spent somewhere else. I never found a good pizza place in that town either. Shakespeare's Pizza is gross.
The walking/biking trails were decent - they have rock walls which are neat to look at. Yes, that is the only nice thing I have to say about Columbia.
M | Columbia, MO