Rivergrove Village

Three lines that do not coincide

This community has a Ypsilanti mailing address, sits in Ypsilanti Charter Township in Washtenaw County, and is served by Van Buren Public Schools, whose district is centered across the county line in Wayne County.

Those are three separate lines drawn by three separate authorities for three separate purposes, and none of them can be derived from the others.

The mailing address is a postal delivery route. It settles nothing about jurisdiction, and in this county it misleads constantly.

Ypsilanti Charter Township is a separate government from the City of Ypsilanti, with its own board, rate, services and zoning. The rate difference between city and township parcels is real and recurring, which is why comparable sales must be matched on municipality.

The school district is a third answer again, and school district boundaries in this region were drawn historically and follow neither municipal nor county lines. A district crossing a county boundary is uncommon but not rare here — Lincoln Consolidated, covering much of the southern part of this township, itself serves five townships across two counties.

Match comparable sales on district. District is one of the larger drivers of price difference between otherwise comparable properties, and a buyer who assumes it from the address — or a seller who lets them — is setting up a problem that surfaces late in a transaction.

All three answers are free and obtainable in an afternoon. Very few people get all three.

A 2004 to 2006 build at around twenty years

A tight three-year build window means the units are genuinely one product — one code cycle, one generation of materials, one construction period — which makes an inspection finding on one unit informative about the others and makes comparable sales unusually reliable.

These are modern-code buildings with modern insulation, modern electrical service and modern egress.

What twenty years brings instead is the first replacement cycle, arriving across every unit at once because they were built together. Original roofs are approaching or at the end of a typical asphalt shingle service life. Original furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters are at or beyond normal expectancy. Original double-glazed windows begin to show seal failure as fogging between the panes.

In a community where the association is responsible for roofs and exteriors — which is usual for townhomes — a roofing cycle arriving across every building in the same couple of years is exactly what a reserve fund exists for, and exactly what produces a special assessment where one was not built.

So the question is not whether the roofs are due. It is whether the money is there. Ask what the reserve balance is, when the roofs were last done or are scheduled, and whether the study is current.

One further timing point: a community completed in 2006 was finished immediately before the housing downturn, so its early sales history came out of a market that no longer exists and should not anchor anything today.

Compact townhomes, and the market they serve

A range from about 1,000 to 1,400 square feet is narrow — roughly a forty percent spread — which makes the units genuinely comparable to one another and gives a comparable analysis a consistent product to work from.

It also places this community in a specific and durable part of the market: compact attached housing where lower cost and lower maintenance are the point rather than a compromise. That buyer pool does not disappear, and it includes both first purchases and people deliberately reducing what they look after.

The variables that do the work within the community are which unit, what it faces, whether it is an end unit, and condition. An end unit has one shared wall instead of two, which is a real and priceable difference that square footage ignores.

In any attached housing, the wall or floor between two households is the variable that most affects daily life and appears in no listing. What matters is the assembly: a genuine double stud wall with an air gap performs far better than a single framed wall with insulation, because sound travels through structure as readily as through air. Where a floor separates two households, footfall carries downward and carpet helps without solving it.

The reliable test is the simplest one: visit at an hour when people are home — an evening or a weekend — rather than mid-morning when the building is empty.

Parking is the other everyday question in a townhome community, and a more common friction point than almost anything else. Establish what comes with the unit, whether it is deeded or assigned, and what visitor provision exists.

What the association documents decide

Buying a condominium unit means buying into a corporation as well as a home, and the corporation's condition is not visible at a showing. Four documents settle it: the master deed and its exhibits, the bylaws, the current budget and the reserve study.

The master deed defines what the unit actually is — where the boundary runs between unit and common elements, and what limited common elements are assigned to its sole use. That is the most misunderstood part of condominium ownership, and it decides who pays for a great many things.

The bylaws set the rules that govern daily life: what may be altered, what may be parked, whether units may be leased and how many at once, and how the board is elected.

The budget and the reserve study together answer whether the association is solvent. An association with thin reserves and a large component near the end of its life is not cheaper — it is a deferred bill with an unknown date, and it arrives as a special assessment.

Board minutes are where a coming expense, a dispute or a construction defect claim surfaces first, and they are the most informative document nobody reads. I go through the recent ones as a matter of course.

One Michigan detail worth knowing: condominium documents are amended by recorded instrument, so what is recorded governs regardless of what any summary says.

Ford Lake is a reservoir Henry Ford built, and the township still runs it

Ford Lake is not a natural lake. It is an artificial reservoir on the Huron River, created by the Ford Lake Dam — originally the Rawsonville Dam — which was designed by Henry Ford and constructed between May 1931 and July 1932. The lake was first flooded in 1931 and covers 975 acres, with a maximum depth of about thirty feet near the eastern end.

It was built to work. The Ford Motor Company owned and operated the dam, and in its early years the hydroelectric station supplied all the electrical energy for Ford's Ypsilanti plant.

In July 1969 the Ford Motor Company gift-deeded the dam and the adjoining lake property to the City and Township of Ypsilanti. It was run by the Joint Ypsilanti Recreation Organization until January 1989, when ownership passed to the Charter Township of Ypsilanti, which owns and operates it still.

That ownership is the single most consequential fact for anyone buying near the water, and it cuts several ways at once. The lake is surrounded by six public parks — Ford Lake, Loonfeather Point, North Bay, South Hydro, North Hydro and Lakeside — which is publicly held open space, the most durable tier there is. The lake level is managed by a dam operator rather than by rainfall alone, so seasonal levels follow operations as well as weather. And a dam is a regulated structure with an inspection regime and long-term capital obligations, all of which are matters of public record that a buyer is entitled to look at.

The township's own records and the state's dam inspection and regulation program are where those answers live, and they are public.

Ypsilanti Township is not the City of Ypsilanti

Ypsilanti Charter Township surrounds the City of Ypsilanti and is a separate government with its own board, tax rate, services, zoning and assessor.

A great many township mailing addresses read Ypsilanti, because a mailing address is a delivery route rather than a jurisdiction. The tax rate differs for otherwise identical properties, which is why comparable sales must be matched on municipality.

School assignment follows a third line again. This part of the county sits where Ypsilanti Community Schools, Lincoln Consolidated and — across the county line — Van Buren Public Schools boundaries approach one another, so the answer is genuinely not guessable from the address. Match comparable sales on district as well as municipality.

Four tiers of protected open space

Where open ground adjoins a property, ownership is the first thing that decides whether it stays open — but not the only one.

Land held by a public body is generally the most durable, though a public body can still sell or repurpose land. Land under a recorded conservation easement is next — an easement runs with the land, surviving a change of owner and of local board. Association common area is real protection that the owners themselves pay for. Unbuilt private land carries the least protection of the four, but that is not the same as none: zoning, recorded deed restrictions and state wetland regulation can each constrain what may be built, filled or cleared, and EGLE requires authorization for specified activities affecting regulated wetland.

From a window all four look identical, which is why it is worth checking the record rather than the view: ownership, any recorded easement or restriction, the zoning, whether wetland is mapped, and whether a development application has already been approved.

Buying or selling here

The school district is the thing most likely to be assumed wrongly, and it is free to settle.

For a seller, the district's own written confirmation removes an assumption every buyer will otherwise make from the address, and it is a stronger position than hoping the question does not come up. A current reserve study against the roof cycle is the second thing worth having.