Newport Creek

A neighborhood that came with its own park

The 1998 development agreement is the origin story here. When the land west of Newport Road and north of M-14 was developed in the late 1990s, the developer deeded a one-acre wooded parcel to the City of Ann Arbor under the development agreement signed that year. That parcel is the Newport Creek Nature Area, and it is what gives the neighborhood its odd, pleasant character: a city-owned wild space with no trails at all, where the Natural Area Preservation program's staff and volunteers pull invasive plants and off-trail wandering is the intended use.

It is not the only piece of civic open space that came out of this stretch of Newport Road at the same moment. The same 1998 agreement also dedicated the land for Riverwood Nature Area, on Riverwood Drive west of Newport Road, established as a park when the city negotiated the development plan for the Newport Ridge subdivision. Together they tell you how this corner of the city was built: parcel by parcel in the late 1990s, with the city trading development approval for preserved woods. The result is a neighborhood where houses sit next to publicly held forest rather than next to more houses.

The homes

Newport Creek is custom construction from 1999 to 2006, not a production subdivision. Houses on Newport Creek Drive carry build dates from 1999 through 2006, with the street's average build year at 2000. Because each house was built to its owner's plan, the forms vary more than a first drive-through suggests: a brick ranch built in 2000 sits down the street from two-story houses with double-height foyers and great rooms. Walkout lower levels recur, because the ground rolls enough that a basement on the downhill side opens to grade.

Lots run from a half acre to an acre, with most backing to heavily wooded ground; one parcel on Newport Creek Drive runs to 5.3 acres. Many sit on cul-de-sacs. The wooded setting is the point of buying here — the house at 1527 Newport Creek Drive, for instance, backs directly onto the nature area — and the mature tree canopy is what separates this subdivision from newer construction elsewhere in the city. The houses are on city water and sewer.

The age of the housing stock sets the terms of a purchase. These houses are past their twentieth birthday now, which puts first-generation furnaces, air conditioning condensers, water heaters and roofs at or past end of life; some have been replaced once already and some have not. What a buyer is evaluating instead is which of the big-ticket systems have been done, and whether finished lower levels and any additions were permitted.

Parks and open space

Bird Hills Nature Area, the largest natural area in the city at 146 acres, is directly across Newport Road. It lies north of M-14, east of Newport Road and south of Bird Road, with five trailheads — two of them near the Newport Road parking area — and hilly woods that are the closest thing Ann Arbor has to a hiking destination inside city limits. Newport Creek's own one-acre nature area is the neighborhood's front door to that system, reached from street parking along Newport Creek Drive and Riverwood's Timber Trail.

Two more small parks sit within a short distance. White Oak Park is a three-acre wooded park between White Oak Drive and Pin Oak Drive, just west of Newport Road and south of Huron River Drive, acquired by the city in 1991 when Newport Hills was developed; it has a path, benches, a picnic table and a small play structure. Riverwood Nature Area, on Riverwood Drive west of Newport Road, is 4.82 acres of remnant upland forest with big trees, spring wildflowers, a high central mound and a small stream through its wetlands. Farther along, Bluffs Nature Area off Sunset Road runs to roughly 40 acres of oak-hickory forest and ravines, its first 20 acres acquired in 1952 and nearly 20 more in 2001, and Barton Nature Area on Huron River Drive adds 98 acres and 3.4 miles of trail along the river.

Schools

Newport Creek is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools, and the three assigned schools are unusually close. Wines Elementary at 1701 Newport Road opened in September 1957 and is named for Levi D. Wines; Forsythe Middle School at 1655 Newport Road opened on September 8, 1960 and is named for Lewis L. Forsythe, principal of Ann Arbor High School from 1917 to 1946. The two share a connected campus on Newport Road, and Wines students continue on to Forsythe. Skyline High School at 2552 North Maple Road opened on September 2, 2008 with ninth graders only, adding a class each year until its first seniors graduated in 2012; it was built to relieve crowding at Huron and Pioneer after voters approved a $240 million bond in June 2004. Skyline's grounds lie just beyond Riverwood's Timber Trail.

Getting around

Newport Road is the neighborhood's spine, and it is a genuinely good road to live off. It runs from Miller Road at its south end north to Maple Road near Huron River Drive, passing Forsythe, Wines and the Bird Hills trailheads along the way; Bird Road ties it to Huron River Drive. Newport Creek Drive is the way in from Newport Road, and it also carries Riverwood's Timber Trail traffic. Downtown Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan campus and the hospitals are a short drive south and east.

M-14 is just to the south. The nearest interchange is Exit 2 at Maple and Miller roads, rebuilt with roundabouts in 2007; Exit 3 is Main Street, Exit 4 is Barton Drive and Whitmore Lake Road, and Exit 5 is the US-23 junction. The freeway is close enough to be convenient, and on a wooded lot this size I still walk buyers to the back property line and let them stand there a minute before they fall for the kitchen.

Buying or selling in Newport Creek

Comparable sales here are a lot-by-lot exercise, not a neighborhood average. With custom houses built to different plans on lots that range from a half acre to five, no two are alike, and the useful comparisons are usually other custom houses of the same vintage off Newport Road — Newport Hills first, then Riverwood with an adjustment for its smaller quarter-acre lots. Newport West is a 1971 condominium and does not belong in the same analysis at all, whatever the name suggests. What moves value inside Newport Creek is what a lot backs onto — preserved woods, the nature area, another house, or the road — and whether the house has a walkout.

For buyers, the work is in the systems and the permits. A house built in 2000 has had time to replace a furnace and a roof once, or not; get the dates. Ask whether the finished walkout and any later additions were permitted through the city. Walk the lot line and know where the wooded buffer is city parkland, which will stay woods, and where it is a neighbor's yard, which may not.

For sellers, the story that sells is the true one: custom construction, wooded acreage inside the city, a nature area that came out of the neighborhood's own development agreement, Bird Hills across the road and three schools close by. Buyers shopping the Newport Road corridor are often comparing three communities at once, and a listing that explains plainly which one this is, and what the lots here actually measure, reaches the buyer who was looking for exactly that.

Not to be confused with

• Newport Hills · Ann Arbor
• Newport West · Ann Arbor
• Riverwood · Ann Arbor