Plymouth Commons

Two subdivisions, one road apart

Plymouth Commons and Deer Creek sit either side of Ridge Road off Powell, and the temptation for anyone drawing comparable sales is to treat them as one market. They were platted separately, and that means they can carry separate recorded restrictions and separate associations, on separate terms.

Those documents govern what an owner may do with fences, outbuildings, exterior changes and parking, and they are enforceable against someone who never read them. They are also free to obtain. The question to answer before an offer is which subdivision a house is actually in and which restrictions attach to it — a question that a listing description of the general area will not settle.

For comparable sales, treat a crossing of Ridge Road as a variable rather than a rounding error. Where the two subdivisions genuinely trade alike, the analysis will show it; where they do not, assuming they do produces a wrong number in whichever direction is least convenient.

Cape Cod and colonial are different products

A Cape Cod is a story and a half: living space on the main floor with bedrooms tucked under a sloped roof upstairs, often with dormers and usually with less usable second-floor square footage than the numbers suggest. A colonial is a full two stories with a formal plan and headroom throughout.

They serve different buyers and they do not function as comparable sales for one another even when they sit on the same street at the same nominal size. Sloped ceilings, knee walls and stair placement change how a Cape Cod actually lives, and buyers either want that or they do not.

So the discipline in a mixed subdivision like this one is to match on form first, then on size, then on condition. A per-square-foot figure averaged across both types will misprice both.

The houses themselves

As with any established Plymouth Township subdivision, the systems cycle is where the money sits. Roofs, furnaces, air conditioning, water heaters, electrical panels and sewer laterals all have dates worth establishing before an offer, and the difference between a house that has had that work done and one that has not will separate two sales more decisively than square footage will.

On Cape Cods specifically, two items deserve attention that a general inspection can skim. Upstairs insulation and ventilation in a sloped-roof space is a common weak point and shows up as ice damming in winter and unusable heat in summer. And any later dormer addition is worth confirming was permitted, because dormers are structural work and not all of them were done properly.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

One hundred and thirty-three houses is a genuine comparable set once form is accounted for, and that makes pricing tractable — provided the analysis does not quietly absorb Deer Creek's sales as though they were this subdivision's.

For a seller, name the form plainly and attach the systems documentation. A well-maintained Cape Cod is a good house and it is a different good house from a colonial; blurring the two in a listing reaches fewer of the right buyers, not more.

For a buyer, establish which subdivision the house is in, get the recorded restrictions that actually apply, match on form.