I'm in a very similar situation to you (but you make more than twice as much) - I need to be sort-of near Philadelphia for work, but I work from home day-to-day. Because of family, we gravitated towards the Lehigh Valley, and the best place we found was Emmaus:
-walkable
-reasonable housing costs
-good school district
-if you for some reason need to go to New York or Philadelphia, neither is very far away
I tried to sell my wife on Easton, but it was further from her family and doesn't have a safe reputation despite feeling pretty safe to me.
There may be other areas like this near Philadelphia, but I think the Lehigh Valley meets your criteria as well. I'm not sure what you mean by not wanting neighbors on top of you - everybody has a different definition. We live in a twin and it doesn't bother us, but many of the boroughs have single houses in dense, walkable neighborhoods. There are also more spread-out neighborhoods, of course.
We paid $180k for a house just under 2000 square feet and have put some more into it to correct some deferred maintenance - probably more than we needed to but I hate half-assing things.