Andover Lakes

Three names, and what travels between them

Where a developer builds several communities or phases under one name and distinguishes them with a qualifier, the parts are related and not identical, and search tools list them as though they were independent.

What usually travels is the design vocabulary — often the same builder, a shared set of plans, a common construction standard and a common era. That makes cross-community comparable sales genuinely useful, and in a market where individual communities are small it often produces a better comparable set than confining a search to one of them.

What usually does not travel is the paperwork. Separate communities are frequently separate plats, which can mean separate recorded restrictions, separate associations, separate budgets and separate reserve positions. Two houses of the same plan in Andover Lakes and Andover Lakes West can sit behind different financial pictures and different rules about fences and outbuildings.

So the discipline is: match the plan and the era for pricing, and check the association and the restrictions separately. Establish which of the three a specific house is in from the recorded documents rather than from the name in a listing description — and for a seller, use the full and correct name consistently, because it keeps the wrong comparables out of an appraisal.

A name with water in it

Where a community's name references water, the first question is whether there is any, what it is, and what rights attach to a specific lot.

Ornamental or amenity water in a residential development is frequently doing a second job as stormwater detention, which makes it an association obligation as well as a view. Sediment accumulates and eventually has to be dredged, outlet structures need maintenance, banks erode and vegetation is managed on a schedule. Dredging a basin is a capital expense that associations of modest size routinely have not reserved for.

And if a lot is described as having water frontage or water access, the right is created by a recorded document attaching to that lot rather than by proximity. Frontage, deeded access and a shared common-area right are three different things worth three different amounts. Where a listing says access without naming the instrument that grants it, that is a question rather than a feature.

Both answers come from the association documents and the plat, and both are worth having before an offer rather than after.

City or township

Plymouth is two municipalities sharing one name. The City of Plymouth is roughly two square miles containing the downtown; Plymouth Charter Township wraps around it and is considerably larger. They are separate governments with separate taxes, separate services and separate elected officials.

A Plymouth address does not distinguish between them, and the difference is real: a different millage, township rather than city services, and the downtown as a drive rather than a walk. Neither is better — they are different products at different prices, and comparable sales drawn across the line without adjusting will produce a wrong number.

The town itself was settled in 1825, when Keziah and William Starkweather, farmers from Preston, Connecticut, bought 240 acres from the federal government on March 11 at a dollar and a quarter an acre. It was incorporated as a village in 1867 and became a city in 1932, which is why the two governments exist today rather than one.

Three high schools on one campus

Plymouth-Canton Community Schools 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 — Salem's Rocks, Canton's Cobras and Plymouth's Wildcats — and each serves grades nine through twelve. But students can take classes across all three academic buildings, and facilities are shared rather than triplicated: one auto shop, one culinary facility, one robotics shop and one varsity football field, alongside three swimming pools and three soccer fields.

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. Elementary and middle school assignment follows the home address, but the high school does not: students are assigned randomly among Canton, Plymouth and Salem. The district also reaches into Canton Township, Salem, Superior and Northville Township.

Windmills, then BB guns

Plymouth's industrial identity came from an unlikely pivot. The Plymouth Iron Windmill Company was formed in 1882 to make windmills, a business that did not prosper. What did prosper was a premium the company gave away with them, and in 1895 the firm renamed itself for it: the Daisy Manufacturing Company.

Daisy made millions of air rifles at its factory on Union Street, southeast of Main, and it was not alone — the Markham Air Rifle Company had been established in Plymouth in July 1886, and the Markham Chicago is generally credited as the first commercially successful BB gun. The Red Ryder, introduced in 1940 and familiar to a great many people from A Christmas Story, was originally made here.

Daisy left for Rogers, Arkansas in 1958. The Union Street factory was used as office space afterward and was occupied until it was demolished in 2005. The Plymouth Historical Museum holds the company's archives.

None of it is visible from a subdivision street today. It is worth knowing because it explains why a farming township on the Middle Rouge grew into a town with a downtown of its own rather than a crossroads, and why the street names and the museum are what they are.

The park is named for the man who invented the center line

Hines Park runs through Plymouth as part of a seventeen-mile chain of Wayne County parkland following the Middle Rouge from Dearborn out to Northville — one of the more substantial pieces of continuous public riverside anywhere in suburban Michigan.

Edward N. Hines sat on the Wayne County Road Commission from 1906 until his death in 1938, having come to it from a Detroit printing business. In 1909 he was responsible for the first full mile of concrete road pavement in the world, on Woodward Avenue between Six Mile and Seven Mile. Two years later he had the idea of painting a line down the middle of a road to separate opposing traffic — the account has him watching a horse-drawn milk wagon leak a line down the street — and the first painted center line was laid in 1911 on River Road in Trenton, in this same county.

Around 1925 he set about building a parkway along the Middle Rouge. Acquiring the land and the money took years. In 1937, the year before he died, the Middle Rouge Parkway was renamed in his honor. Hilltop Golf Course is nearby too — eighteen public holes built in 1927, redesigned by Jerry Matthews in 1982, and run by Plymouth Township's parks department.

Outdoor recreation around Powell Road

The western township's public recreation includes Hilltop Golf Course at 47000 Powell Road and Plymouth Township Park on Ann Arbor Trail. Golf, walking paths, a fishing pond and play areas offer different ways to spend time outdoors. Farther afield, Maybury State Park in the Northville area provides a larger trail destination. Trips toward downtown Plymouth lead to the shops and dining around Kellogg Park, including Compari's on South Main and the Penn Theatre on Penniman.

Buying or selling here

The shared name widens the useful comparable set once the differences are known, which is a genuine advantage where individual communities are small. It is a liability only when the differences are assumed away.

For a seller, name the specific community, state the district, and be clear about what water rights the lot actually carries. Those three remove nearly all the ambiguity a buyer or an appraiser would otherwise guess at.