Woodlands of Chatterton Village

Overlapping names, and which documents govern

Where neighboring developments were built in phases and marketed under variations of one name, listing sites and automated valuation tools tend to treat the variations inconsistently — sometimes as one community, sometimes as two, sometimes creating a third by combining them. Here the two are not even the same kind of housing.

The consequences are practical. Recorded restrictions attach to the master deed or the plat, not to marketing names, so the rules governing a particular home come from the document its own community recorded. Associations follow the same logic: a condominium association and a subdivision association are different instruments with different obligations.

For comparable sales the risk is that a tool draws across the boundary without adjusting. A condominium unit and a detached house are not interchangeable comparables whatever the two communities are called, and the name will not stop a tool from treating them as though they were.

For a seller, using the full and correct name consistently is a small thing that keeps the wrong comparables out of an appraisal. For a buyer, asking which of the two a listing actually refers to is a reasonable first question rather than a pedantic one.

The three documents to ask for

A condominium comes with a master deed, bylaws and an association, and all of them are worth reading early rather than after closing. They are free to obtain and they are enforceable against an owner who never looked at them.

The restrictions govern the visible things people have opinions about: fences and their height and material, outbuildings and sheds, exterior colors and alterations, parking, what may sit in a driveway, and often satellite dishes, basketball hoops and boats. For a buyer with a specific plan — a fence, a shed, a detached garage — that document decides the question before an offer rather than after.

The association's obligations here are the wide kind: building exteriors and roofs, common grounds and landscaping, snow and drives, and most consequentially any stormwater detention basin the site included. Basins are functioning infrastructure rather than landscape — sediment accumulates, outlet structures need maintenance, banks erode, and dredging one is a capital expense associations of this scale routinely have not reserved for.

So ask for three documents, not one: the master deed and bylaws, the current budget, and any reserve study. Then look at what the monthly assessment has done over the last five years rather than only what it is today. A flat assessment in a community approaching thirty years is a question, not a reassurance.

The homes

As in any established Canton community, the systems cycle carries most of the difference between one sale and another. Roofs, furnaces, air conditioning, water heaters, electrical panels and sewer laterals all have dates worth establishing before an offer, and the difference between a home that has had that work done and one that has not will separate two sales more decisively than square footage will. In a condominium some of that work belongs to the association, which is the first thing to establish.

Establishing the build year of the specific building is the first step, because it determines which inspection agenda applies. Those differ genuinely by decade: aluminum branch wiring and certain electrical panel brands in late-1960s and 1970s construction; polybutylene supply piping in some houses built into the mid-1990s; hardboard or composite siding of the 1980s and 1990s, which needs inspecting close up at the bottom courses rather than from the curb.

A camera inspection of the sewer lateral is the highest-value small expense available on housing of any age here.

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

The naming overlap is the thing to handle deliberately rather than hope around, because it is the most likely source of a wrong number on either side.

For a seller, name the plat, name the association, and state the district. Those three facts remove nearly all the ambiguity a buyer or an appraiser would otherwise have to guess at.