Cherry Hill Village Condominiums

Attached housing inside a plan, not appended to one

This is the distinction that makes these units different from most condominiums in the township, and it is a design distinction rather than a marketing one.

In the ordinary suburban pattern, attached housing is placed at the edge of a development or on a separate parcel entirely — its own drive, its own parking court, its own boundary. In a traditional neighborhood development the housing types are deliberately mixed along the same streets, so a townhouse can sit in the same block as a detached house and face the same footway.

That has a real consequence for how these units live. The street in front of the door is a village street rather than a parking court, and the building addresses it with a porch rather than a garage door, because the garages are at the rear or the side and reached from a lane. In a conventional condominium development, the first thing you see arriving at a unit is the parking; here it is the front of the building.

It also has a consequence for value. An attached unit at the edge of a subdivision derives little from the detached housing near it. An attached unit woven into a planned street network shares the streetscape, the plantings and the public spaces that the plan created — which is part of what the assessment pays for.

Built over ten years by one builder

The attached housing went up between 2001 and 2011 under the Bruce Building Company, which is a ten-year span and a single builder — an unusual combination worth reading carefully.

One builder across a decade generally means consistent construction detailing, which makes knowledge transferable between units in a way it is not in a development with several builders. If you learn what these buildings do well and badly, that knowledge applies broadly here.

But a ten-year span also means the earliest units and the latest differ by a full decade of code, materials and practice, and by a decade of accumulated wear. A 2002 unit and a 2010 unit are not the same product and should not sit in the same comparable set without adjustment. The 2008 downturn falls in the middle of that window too, which affected build pace and sometimes specification across the industry.

The earliest units are now past twenty years, which puts original roofs, mechanicals and water heaters at or beyond typical service life; the latest are approaching fifteen.

The documents that decide the cost of ownership

In a condominium, the roofs, drives, siding and shared drainage belong to the association rather than to the individual owner, so their age lands on the association's budget. That makes the reserve study the most consequential document in the transaction — more so than the inspection of the unit itself.

Ask what the assessment has done over the past five years rather than only what it is today. A single-level unit assessment against ageing common elements is a question, not a reassurance, and a special assessment is what arrives when reserves fall short of a replacement that could not wait.

Then read the master deed's division of responsibility, which decides whether the windows, the deck, the garage door and the basement belong to the owner or the association. That division varies between associations and should never be assumed from experience of another one.

Then the minutes, which is where a pending assessment or a long-running maintenance dispute surfaces before it reaches a disclosure.

What the association is maintaining here

A traditional neighborhood development creates more shared fabric than a conventional subdivision does, and shared fabric costs money to keep.

The rear lanes that serve the garages are a good example. They are additional paved surface that a conventional development would not have built at all, and they need plowing, patching and eventual resurfacing like any other. The village's planting, its public spaces and its gardens are maintained rather than mown. These are the things that make the place what it is, and they are also line items.

That is not a criticism — it is the trade the plan makes, and it is worth understanding rather than discovering. What it means practically is that an assessment here is not measuring the same thing as an assessment in a development with none of that fabric, and comparing the two numbers without comparing their contents produces a false conclusion.

Ask what the assessment covers, item by item, and ask specifically who is responsible for the rear lane serving a given unit.

The village around it

Cherry Hill Village was built around a settlement that was already there. The hamlet at the crossroads of Cherry Hill and Ridge Roads originated in the 1830s as the economic and social center of the surrounding farmland — where families traded at the general store, collected mail, had shoes made for themselves and their horses, and gathered for school, church and picnics. Before it was Cherry Hill it was known simply as The Ridge, and it held Canton's first church.

The Village Theater at Cherry Hill anchors the modern village, and Preservation Park at 500 North Ridge Road holds the township's collection of relocated historic buildings, including a pole barn museum open on farmers' market Sundays.

For an attached unit, proximity to all of that is a substantial part of the product — more so than for a detached house on a larger lot, because a smaller private footprint makes the public one count for more.

Three school districts, not one

Canton Township is served by three separate school districts: Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, which covers the substantial majority of the township, along with Van Buren Public Schools and Wayne-Westland Community Schools.

That makes assignment an address-level question rather than a township-level one. Match comparable sales on district as well as on subdivision and size.

The question buyers skip

Sound transmission is the attached-housing question people most often leave until after they move in.

It varies enormously with how the party walls and floors were built — whether a wall runs all the way to the roof deck or stops at a ceiling, what the floor assembly is, and how mechanical chases were framed. Two buildings of the same age by the same builder can perform quite differently.

There is no document that answers it. The only method is to stand in a unit at an hour when neighbors are home, which means an evening or a weekend rather than a midday showing of an empty building.

Buying or selling here

Two things carry most of the weight: the year built for the specific unit, and what the assessment actually covers.

For a seller, the plan is the story. Rear-lane garages, a porch facing a village street and attached housing woven into the block rather than pushed to the edge are genuine differences from the ordinary suburban condominium, and they are worth stating rather than leaving for a buyer to notice.