Traver Lakes

Ponds and fountains are infrastructure as often as amenity

Most ponds inside residential developments of the last several decades are doing two jobs at once. Nearly every development of that period was required to manage stormwater somehow, and a pond frequently does that alongside its amenity role.

Where a pond is an engineered detention or retention basin, its level is designed to fluctuate — which surprises people expecting a constant ornamental water body in a dry August — and its condition is functional rather than cosmetic.

The obligations are the same either way and are consistently underestimated. Ponds silt, weed and occasionally need dredging, which is expensive and easy to defer. Any outlet structure carries its own inspection duties. Edges erode, and where an edge is engineered — riprap, a wall, a planted margin — that is a maintained element with a life of its own.

A fountain or aerator is machinery, not scenery: a submersible pump on a float, with a power feed run out to it, a control panel and often lighting. It runs on the association's electricity through the warm months, comes out before ice and goes back in each spring, and has a service life measured in years. Aeration genuinely helps a pond, which is why they are there — it is an argument for finding the line in the budget rather than against having them.

So the test is whether the reserve study names each pond, any outlet structure and each fountain as their own lines with dates and figures. The pond is the single item most often missing from a reserve study altogether, and dredging is exactly the large deferrable expense that becomes a special assessment.

For a unit facing water, flood plain status is parcel-specific rather than community-specific. And a water outlook is a real and priceable difference within one community that square footage ignores entirely.

A chain of ponds is a chain of obligations

Where a community is built along several connected water bodies rather than one, everything in the section above multiplies, and the arithmetic is worth making explicit.

Several ponds means several sets of banks, several outlet structures, several fountains and several dredging cycles — and where they are connected, the connections themselves are structures: culverts, weirs, channels or pipes that move water between them. Those are the least visible items an association owns and among the easiest to defer.

A connected chain also behaves as a system. A problem at one end — a blocked outlet, a silted basin, an eroded bank — affects the water levels and the flow at the others, which means maintenance cannot be done pond by pond as budget allows without thinking about the whole.

So the reserve study test is more demanding here than usual. It should name each pond, the connecting structures, each outlet and each fountain, with dates and figures. A study that treats the water as a single line, or omits the connections, is not telling the owners what they need to know.

The paths are the related item and are also association common area: surfacing needs periodic renewal, and where a path crosses water or wet ground there are usually structures — boardwalk, culverts, small bridges — with their own lives.

The area drains toward the Huron through the Traver Creek system, and Washtenaw County's Water Resources Commissioner — the office formerly called the drain commissioner — is the authority for drainage across the county. Where any of this water is part of an established county drain, that carries its own maintenance regime and its own district assessment, which is a public record a buyer is entitled to see.

None of that argues against the setting. A chain of ponds with paths through it is a genuinely good place to live. It argues for a reserve study that has actually been read.

Townhomes and flats of the 1970s

Two forms in one community means two products, and in attached housing the difference between them is largely about what is above and below.

A townhome stacks its own space vertically with party walls on one or both sides and nothing belonging to another household overhead. A single-level unit is on one level, which reaches the buyer pool for whom stairs are a requirement to avoid — but only if it is reached without stairs, which is the question people forget to ask. A single-level flat up a flight of stairs excludes exactly the pool the form is otherwise made for.

In any attached housing, the wall or floor between two households is the variable that most affects daily life and appears in no listing. What matters is the assembly: a genuine double stud wall with an air gap and no shared framing performs far better than a single framed wall with insulation, because sound travels through structure as readily as through air. Where a floor separates two households, footfall carries downward through the structure, and carpet helps without solving it.

Construction of the 1970s reflects the standards of its period rather than current ones, which is worth knowing rather than worrying about — the variation between buildings is larger than the variation between decades.

The reliable test is the simplest: visit at an hour when people are home — an evening or a weekend — rather than mid-morning when the building is empty.

An end unit has one shared wall instead of two, which is a real and priceable difference that square footage ignores entirely. And a pond-facing unit and an interior unit are not the same product.

A 1970s build sets the inspection agenda

A build of 1973 to 1979 puts a specific set of items on the inspection list, and polybutylene is not among them — that piping came into general use as this community was finishing. The period items here are aluminum branch-circuit wiring in the earliest units, lead paint, asbestos-containing materials, and electrical panels of brands that have since drawn attention.

Aluminum branch-circuit wiring was used widely until about 1976, so it is possible in the earlier buildings and unlikely in the later ones. It is not a defect in itself; failures occur at connections, where aluminum loosens over time and generates heat. Insurers ask about it, and remediation at the devices is well established. Have the wiring identified by material at the panel and at a sample of outlets rather than inferred from the build year.

In a condominium there is a wrinkle a house does not have: whether supply piping is unit or common element varies with the master deed, and that decides who pays for a replacement and who decides when it happens. Where an association has already re-piped, that is a substantial thing to have behind you and it will appear in the minutes and the reserve history.

At around fifty years, every major component has been replaced at least once. Ask what has been done and when: roofs, heating and cooling equipment, water heaters, windows and any re-piping. Ask also whether the work was funded from reserves or by special assessment — that answer says more about how the association is run than any component's age does.

Lead paint and asbestos are the remaining period items. Paint applied before 1978 may be lead-based, which matters most where surfaces are disturbed by renovation; asbestos of this era turns up in resilient floor tile and its mastic, pipe and duct insulation and textured ceilings. Neither should stop a purchase, but both should be identified before work that disturbs them.

The Plymouth Road corridor

Plymouth Road is one of the main routes into Ann Arbor from the northeast, and it serves the University of Michigan's north campus, the North Campus Research Complex — the former Pfizer research campus the university acquired — and the medical center beyond.

That is an unusually stable set of employers to be minutes from. A large public university and an academic medical center underpin demand in a way few private employers could, and institutional land is also the most durable kind of neighbor: an institution holds ground for its own long-term purposes rather than as a business that can be sold.

US-23 lies a short run east and M-14 runs west from the northern side of the city, which puts a good deal within reasonable reach without crossing the center.

The corridor trade-off applies as it always does: convenience and traffic in the same package, varying sharply with distance from the road, orientation and what stands between. Within one community those differences are large and are not reflected in square footage. A weekday rush hour visit with the windows open settles it.

For a community aimed squarely at commuters, that variation is worth pricing rather than averaging — a unit facing the ponds and a unit facing the road are different products at different values.

What the association documents decide

Buying a condominium unit means buying into a corporation as well as a home, and the corporation's condition is not visible at a showing. Four documents settle it: the master deed and its exhibits, the bylaws, the current budget and the reserve study.

The master deed defines what the unit actually is — where the boundary runs between unit and common elements, and what limited common elements are assigned to its sole use. That is the most misunderstood part of condominium ownership, and it decides who pays for a great many things.

The bylaws set the rules that govern daily life: what may be altered, what may be parked, whether units may be leased and how many at once, and how the board is elected.

The budget and the reserve study together answer whether the association is solvent. An association with thin reserves and a large component near the end of its life is not cheaper — it is a deferred bill with an unknown date, and it arrives as a special assessment.

Board minutes are where a coming expense, a dispute or a construction defect claim surfaces first, and they are the most informative document nobody reads. I go through the recent ones as a matter of course.

One Michigan detail worth knowing: condominium documents are amended by recorded instrument, so what is recorded governs regardless of what any summary says.

An Ann Arbor address is not necessarily the City of Ann Arbor

The City of Ann Arbor is ringed by townships — Scio, Pittsfield, Ann Arbor, Superior and Lodi among them — whose mailing addresses read Ann Arbor. A mailing address is a delivery route rather than a jurisdiction, and it settles nothing.

Each township is a separate government with its own board, tax rate, services, zoning and assessor. The rate difference between a city parcel and a township one is real and recurring, which is why comparable sales must be matched on municipality or the analysis imports an error nothing in the paperwork flags. Rates and taxable values both change, so compare the current millage and the parcel's own taxable value rather than a remembered difference; a tax bill arrives on the local schedule, and a lender collects an estimated share of it monthly.

School assignment follows a third line again and tracks neither the municipal nor the postal boundary. The clearest example sits a few miles away: a subdivision whose addresses read Ann Arbor, whose taxes go to Pittsfield Township, and whose children attend Saline schools — three different answers, all three correct, none derivable from the others.

Match comparable sales on district as well as on municipality.

Four tiers of protected open space

Where open ground adjoins a property, ownership is the first thing that decides whether it stays open — but not the only one.

Land held by a public body is generally the most durable, though a public body can still sell or repurpose land. Land under a recorded conservation easement is next — an easement runs with the land, surviving a change of owner and of local board. Association common area is real protection that the owners themselves pay for. Unbuilt private land carries the least protection of the four, but that is not the same as none: zoning, recorded deed restrictions and state wetland regulation can each constrain what may be built, filled or cleared, and EGLE requires authorization for specified activities affecting regulated wetland.

From a window all four look identical, which is why it is worth checking the record rather than the view: ownership, any recorded easement or restriction, the zoning, whether wetland is mapped, and whether a development application has already been approved.

Schools

Traver Lakes is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. District boundaries are redrawn from time to time.

Buying or selling here

The reserve study and what a unit faces are the two things that decide this purchase.

For a seller, a reserve study naming each pond, the connecting structures and each fountain separately is the strongest document available in a community like this one, because it answers the question a well-advised buyer will ask and many associations cannot. Being explicit about what a unit faces, and whether it is an end unit, is the other half.