Woodbridge Estates

What condominium ownership changes

Ownership here is condominium ownership: the owner holds a unit plus an undivided interest in the common elements, and the master deed and bylaws — not a zoning ordinance alone — govern what may be changed outside.

The division of responsibility is the thing to read carefully rather than assume. In a community like this the association typically carries the exterior, the roofs, the drives and the landscaping while the owner carries the interior and often the mechanicals, but exactly where that line falls is set by the documents and varies from one community to the next. Assuming it works the way a previous condominium did is a common and expensive mistake.

The document set to request is the master deed, the bylaws, the current budget, any reserve study, the certificate of insurance and the most recent meeting minutes. Minutes are the most informative and the most often skipped: a pending special assessment or a long-running maintenance argument surfaces there first.

Newer construction, and the reserve trap

Newer condominium projects carry a specific and well-documented risk that has nothing to do with build quality: a young association can show a low assessment simply because it has not yet begun funding the replacement of anything.

Roofs, drives, siding and mechanical plant all have finite lives. In year five none of them needs replacing, so an association that has not reserved looks inexpensive. In year twenty they all need attention at once, and the money either exists or arrives as a special assessment.

The reserve study is what distinguishes the two, and in a newer project it is more informative than the current assessment figure. A community charging more and funding its reserves properly is in a materially better position than one charging less and funding nothing, and the monthly difference between them is usually small relative to what a special assessment costs.

Ask what the assessment has done since the association took over from the developer, and whether that transition has happened at all.

Two and three bedrooms, and who that reaches

A community of two- and three-bedroom units serves a defined set of buyers, and it is worth being clear about the market it actually sits in rather than describing it generically.

Condominium living in a township like Canton typically trades against two alternatives: a small single-family house at a similar price with more responsibility and more ground, or a rental. The condominium's argument is a maintained exterior, no lawn and no roof to worry about, and a fixed monthly figure that covers them — provided the reserves are real.

Where a unit offers single-level living, that is worth naming explicitly, because it is in structural short supply and reaches a defined and durable set of buyers. Where it does not, saying so avoids wasting the time of buyers who need it.

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.

Plymouth-Canton also runs an arrangement with no real parallel nearby: the Plymouth-Canton Educational Park puts three separate high schools on a single campus of about 305 acres — Salem, which opened in 1970, Canton, which opened in 1972, and Plymouth, which opened in 2002. Each has its own building, name, colors and mascot, students take classes across all three, and facilities are shared rather than triplicated. It is a structural fact about the district rather than a matter of opinion, and it regularly surprises people arriving from somewhere with a conventional single high school. Which of the three a student attends is not decided by address: the district assigns high school students randomly across all three.

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 fabric. 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 and no longer stands.

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.

It 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.

The township 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 across 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.

Buying or selling here

A newer condominium community prices legibly once unit type is accounted for, and the association's finances do more work here than in almost any other kind of purchase.