Smokler Bolgos

The Smokler company, and what it built here

The name is a developer's, and following it turns up something worth knowing: the Bert L. Smokler Company built at scale across this region, and its name is attached to at least four developments in three different communities.

Smokler built Georgetown Commons in Ann Arbor between 1972 and 1977. The adjoining single-family Georgetown neighborhood is known locally as the Smokler Hutzel neighborhood, after its developers. Smokler Textile is a subdivision in Ypsilanti Township, built 1973 to 1979. And this one, in northeast Ann Arbor, from 1963 to 1973.

That matters practically rather than merely as trivia. A developer working at scale across a region builds to a consistent standard and a consistent vocabulary, so what one of his subdivisions does well and badly, the others tend to as well. If you have looked at one Smokler development and know its houses, that knowledge travels further than it usually would — across municipal lines and across a decade.

The Bolgos half is a second family name, and where a subdivision carries personal names the recorded plat generally names the proprietors who dedicated it and carries the date. The Washtenaw County Register of Deeds holds it, and it settles both the history and the restrictions in one document.

One naming note: this subdivision also appears in listings as Maplewood Smokler Bolgos. Search both forms when assembling comparables, because an analysis under one silently omits sales filed under the other.

The research complex next door, and what happened to it

The North Campus Research Complex is within walking distance, and the story of that site is one of the more consequential things to have happened to this part of Ann Arbor.

It was built as Pfizer's Ann Arbor research campus — a substantial pharmaceutical research operation employing a great many people. Pfizer closed it, and the University of Michigan acquired the property, reopening it as the North Campus Research Complex.

The relevance for a neighborhood next door is that the site went from a private corporate campus, subject to a single company's decisions, to a university holding. A university is a different kind of neighbor: its horizon is longer, its use of a site is more diverse, and it is very unlikely to close and leave.

For anyone assessing this location, that is the substantive point. Proximity to a major employer is worth something, and proximity to one that cannot readily relocate is worth more. The transition itself is also a useful reminder that a corporate campus is not permanent infrastructure, however large it looks.

The practical questions are the ordinary ones for any large institutional neighbor: traffic at shift hours on the specific streets, and any lighting or activity that carries. Both are best assessed by being there at those hours.

A park, a swim club and a nature center — three different things

This neighborhood is described by three amenities, and they sit at three different tiers of durability, which is worth separating.

Sugar Bush Park is a city park. Public ownership is the most durable tier: it does not depend on anyone continuing to fund it and it cannot close and be sold as a business can.

The Thurston Nature Center is a natural area adjoining the neighborhood — a different kind of public asset again, and one whose value is precisely that it is not developed. Where a property backs onto it, that outlook is protected in a way an outlook across an undeveloped private parcel is not.

The Orchard Hill Swim Club is the one to look at carefully, because it is the tier below. A private swim club is a membership organization with its own finances, its own membership base and its own ageing plant — a pool, a filtration system, a building. Membership is generally a separate cost from the house and is not automatic, and a club is a business that can close. That is not a criticism; it is a distinction worth making before treating it as part of the property.

So the questions are: is membership open, what does it cost, is there a waiting list, and how is the club funded. Those are answerable and worth asking rather than assuming.

A house from the 1960s or early 1970s

A ten-year build window means the earliest and latest houses differ by a decade of code and practice.

Aluminum branch circuit wiring is the era question and this window sits squarely inside it — the material was used in single-family housing from roughly the mid-1960s into the mid-1970s. Where present it is a manageable condition with a recognized remediation, but it must be identified by an electrician rather than assumed from the decade in either direction. It is the single most important thing to establish about a house of this vintage.

Galvanized steel supply piping is the second, corroding from the inside and showing as falling pressure long before it shows as a leak. Original electrical service was sized for the appliance loads of the time. Insulation levels are well below current practice — a running cost rather than a defect.

Lead-based paint disclosure applies to anything built before 1978, which covers this entire subdivision.

And the layers matter most. A house of this age is on its third or fourth owner with successive updates over an original core, and the joints between them are where problems live. Permit history belongs to the city rather than to the seller's memory.

The other side is real: sixty years is long enough for settlement and drainage failures to have declared themselves, and the trees planted when these streets were new are mature now.

Public parkland is the amenity that does not depend on anyone

Ann Arbor holds an unusually large amount of public parkland and natural area for a city its size, and proximity to it is the most dependable amenity claim there is — precisely because, unlike a golf course, a private common or a shared pool, it does not depend on anyone continuing to operate or fund anything. Land held by a city is not a business that can close and be sold.

That places it at the top of the four tiers worth distinguishing: land held outright by a public body; land under a recorded conservation easement, which survives a change of owner and of council; association common area, protected while the association holds it and its documents say so; and merely unbuilt privately owned land, protected only by whatever zoning and wetland rules apply.

That last tier is the one most often mistaken for the others, because from a window it looks identical to all three. One inquiry to the city or a title company settles which applies, and the difference moves price substantially.

The precision that listings skip is worth adding: what matters for a specific house is the distance to the nearest entrance and whether the route crosses an arterial road. A park four blocks away across a residential street and one four blocks away across five lanes are different propositions, and a map does not distinguish them. Walk it.

Schools

These neighborhoods are generally served by Ann Arbor Public Schools, but assignment is set by address rather than by neighborhood name, and district and attendance boundaries in this county follow neither municipal nor postal lines.

Buying or selling here

At sixty years the differentiator is documentation, not presentation.

For a seller, dated records for the electrical service, the supply piping, the roof, the furnace and the water heater answer in advance the questions any inspection of a 1960s house will raise. And the swim club's terms are worth having to hand, because a buyer will ask.