Fairways West

The roads here are private

This is the structural fact about the Pheasant Run communities and it is easy to miss on a listing. The Pheasant Run Roadway Maintenance Association takes in three subdivisions plus Canton Township itself, and it owns and maintains the roadways within its jurisdiction — including sidewalks and curbs — along with Summit Parkway and Glengarry Boulevard.

A five-person board governs it: one representative from each of the three subdivisions and two from the township. The three plus the township contribute roughly $350,000 a year, and the association holds a reserve of about $450,000 against future work. Pheasant View's contribution rose to $64,671 in 2025, a ten percent increase, and that flowed straight through to a $650 annual assessment for fiscal 2026; Fairways and Fairway Pines carry assessments over $715.

What private roads mean in practice is that plowing, patching, resurfacing and eventual reconstruction are funded by the owners rather than by the county road commission — a genuine cost that a public-road subdivision covers through taxes instead. The reserve fund decides whether reconstruction arrives as a planned expense or a special assessment, which makes the reserve study the document that matters most.

Two assessments, not one

Where a property is inside one of the member subdivisions, the owner pays into that subdivision's own association, and that association in turn pays into the roadway association. A change at the roadway level flows through to the individual assessment — which is exactly what happened for fiscal 2026.

The consequence for comparison shopping is that dues in these communities are not measuring the same thing as dues in a subdivision with public roads. Part of what sits inside the number is road infrastructure that a public-road neighborhood receives through its taxes. Comparing a $650 assessment against a $200 one elsewhere is comparing two different products.

Ask for both sets of documents: the subdivision's budget and restrictions, and the roadway association's budget and reserve study. Recent minutes from both are where a reconstruction schedule shows up before it reaches a listing.

The golf course

Pheasant Run Golf Club opened in 1995 at 46500 Summit Parkway — twenty-seven holes laid out by Arthur Hills across more than three hundred acres of turf, natural wetlands, woodland and native grasses, playing as three nines.

It is owned by Canton Township, which is the durable part. A course held by a municipality is not a private business that can be closed and sold for redevelopment, and there is a community nearby where exactly that happened and ended in a decade of litigation. Public ownership is not an absolute guarantee, but it is a different order of certainty.

For a house on or near the course, frontage is a pricing factor and a disclosure topic at once. Errant balls, early-morning maintenance equipment and turf spraying schedules come with the open view.

The five hamlets, and the one that survived

Before the subdivisions, Canton was a scattering of crossroads settlements — five hamlets, of which Cherry Hill is the last to retain substantial historic significance. Sheldon Corners was established in 1825 beside the Sauk Trail, now Michigan Avenue, and grew into a small village with a post office, general store, blacksmith, church and school.

Cherry Hill was settled the same year and was originally called Ridge, for the ridge shore of an ancient lake it sat on. It took its present name around 1865, after Abner Hitchcock built an inn he called the Cherry Hill House for the wild cherry trees growing there; that inn later served as a general store and a dance hall and was the social center of the community for generations. The first area church, Cherry Hill United Methodist, went up in 1834.

Dairying followed. The Ypsi Creamery and the Detroit Creamery, later Wilson Dairy, operated until 1940, when Henry Ford bought the dairy and folded it into his village industry program — which here provided work for veterans of the Second World War disabled by their service. The Cherry Hill Historic District was added to the National Register in 2003. Eleven Canton houses built between 1825 and 1904 are listed under the Canton Township Multiple Property Submission, most of them added in 2000 and the rest in 2003. One of the eleven, the Sheldon Inn of 1825 on Michigan Avenue, was demolished in 2021.

How Canton got this big

Canton became a Michigan township on March 7, 1834 and was named, like the neighboring Nankin and Peking townships, after a city in China — Canton is the only one of the three still carrying the name. New England settlers arrived after the Erie Canal opened in 1825 and farmed the flat ground for well over a century; from 1925 to 1970 the township was known as the Sweet Corn Capital of Michigan, and its creameries supplied the region.

The township counted about 5,300 residents in 1961. What changed it was I-275, completed in 1977: once the freeway was in, a township of farms sat within an hour of anywhere in metropolitan Detroit. The population approached 50,000 by the 1980 census and reached 98,659 by 2020, making Canton the second most-populated township in Michigan. At the peak, construction here sometimes exceeded two thousand homes a year.

Canton has put an unusual amount of land into public recreation since. It owns two golf courses — Fellows Creek, bought in 1978, and Pheasant Run, opened in 1995 with 27 holes by Arthur Hills on more than three hundred acres. Heritage Park runs to 105 acres on Canton Center Road, the Summit on the Park beside it is a 95,000-square-foot recreation and cultural center opened in January 1996, and the Lower Rouge River Recreation Trail, begun in 2007, runs out to the I-275 Metro Trail.

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.

Match comparable sales on district as well as on subdivision and size.

Buying or selling here

The assessment is the thing to explain rather than defend. A buyer who understands it covers privately owned roads with a funded reserve behind them reads it very differently from one who sees a high due and moves on.

For a seller, having the roadway association's budget and reserve figures to hand turns a question mark into a selling point — and stating the plat precisely avoids a buyer discovering later that the documents they were shown govern the subdivision next door.