Rivers Edge at Cherry Hill Village

Buying into a community that is not finished

A development with built lots and unbuilt lots side by side raises a specific set of questions that a completed subdivision does not, and they are answerable rather than merely worrying.

The first is control. Until a defined proportion of lots is sold, the developer typically holds the votes in the association and effectively sets the budget. Ask whether the association has transitioned to owner control, and if not, what the schedule is under the governing documents.

The second is completion. Have the common areas — landscaping, walkways, any private drainage or detention infrastructure — been formally completed and turned over, or are they still the developer's obligation? An unfinished common element is a future cost to somebody, and which somebody is set by the documents.

The third is reserves. A young association with new infrastructure can carry a low assessment simply by not yet funding the replacement of anything. Ask for the reserve study. Landscaping, walkways and detention basins all have replacement cycles, and whether they arrive as a planned expense or a special assessment is decided now.

The fourth is simply what happens next door. On a street with unbuilt lots, a buyer should understand what may be built there, to what design standards, and over what period — because it will be built during their ownership.

What Cherry Hill Village is

The development this sits on the edge of is unusual for Canton. Cherry Hill Village began in 2000 as a neotraditional or New Urbanist scheme, ultimately running to more than 750 houses, using traditional architecture and site planning to produce something with the feel of a small town rather than a conventional subdivision — a town center at Cherry Hill and Ridge Roads, and a layout meant to put daily things within reach on foot.

It was deliberate policy rather than a developer's whim. Canton adopted a master plan in 1998 with the stated aim of preserving the area's history amid development, and the village was the result.

For a buyer at the edge of it, the relevant question is which of the village's characteristics actually reach this community — its design standards, its association arrangements, its shared amenities and its town center — and which stop at a boundary. Those answers come from the recorded documents rather than from the name on the sign.

New construction has its own diligence list

The inspection agenda for a recently built house looks nothing like the one for a fifty-year-old one, and the mistake is assuming there is no agenda at all.

Builder warranty comes first: what the term is, what it covers, and whether any remaining coverage transfers to a subsequent buyer. That depends on the specific document rather than on general practice. Second, the punch list — whether items identified at the original walkthrough were actually completed, which the first owner's file will show. Third, the things that surface at around the ten-year mark rather than the thirtieth: grading and drainage that has settled, deck and porch attachments, and early water intrusion around windows and flashing.

None of that is exotic. But a general inspection that treats a recent house as automatically sound is not doing the work, and on a lot where the ground was disturbed recently, settlement and drainage deserve particular attention.

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

Seventy-two lots in mixed states of completion means the comparable set is small and moving. A sale from two years ago in a partly built community may not describe today's market, and a sale on a built lot says little about the value of an unbuilt one.

For a seller, the association's status is part of the product: a transitioned association with a funded reserve study is a materially better proposition than one still under developer control with no reserve plan, and if the former applies it is worth saying with the documents attached.

For a buyer, the order is the association's control and completion status, the reserve position, what may still be built nearby, and then the house. The village next door is a genuine and unusual amenity; establish precisely how much of it comes with the address.