Smokler Textile

More than one plat under one name

This subdivision was recorded in at least two sections — the original plat and a second — and both trade under the same neighborhood name. That is common enough in Washtenaw County and it matters more than it appears to.

Separate plats can carry separate recorded restrictions, and where an association exists it may cover one section and not another, or cover both under different terms. Two houses four streets apart can therefore be governed by different documents while sharing a name, a school and a listing description.

So the question to answer early is which plat a specific house sits in and which recorded restrictions apply to it. That determines what an owner may do with fences, outbuildings, exterior changes and parking, and it is free to establish before an offer rather than after a dispute.

It has a pricing consequence too: when drawing comparable sales, the section is a variable worth checking rather than assuming, particularly where one plat was completed several years after the other.

A note on the name

Two names are stacked here and only one of them is explainable. Smokler is the developer whose name went on the plat, which is ordinary enough — a great many Michigan subdivisions carry the name of whoever recorded them.

Textile Road is the interesting half, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.

The road is old, it runs east–west across several townships, and where its name came from has been lost.

Three house types, three sub-markets

Ranch, split-level and two-story construction sitting together in one subdivision is characteristic of mid-1970s development, and it produces something buyers and sellers routinely get wrong: three distinct products behaving as three distinct markets under one address.

A single-story ranch is in structurally short supply and tends to draw buyers who need or want single-level living. A split-level is a specific taste with a narrower audience. A two-story colonial competes with the largest set of alternatives across the township. Matching a comparable sale on square footage while ignoring which of the three it is will produce a wrong number, and reliably in the same direction each time.

Within each type the variable is condition. Which houses have had the fifty-year work done, and what it cost, is most of the analysis, and it is knowable before an offer.

A fifty-year-old house

Houses from 1973 to 1979 are now around half a century old, and everything mechanical in them has been through two or three rounds. Roofs, furnaces, air conditioning, water heaters, electrical panels and sewer laterals all have dates worth establishing, and the dates matter far more than the finishes.

Several items belong specifically to the era. Some construction of the early 1970s used aluminum branch wiring, which is not a defect in itself but requires particular connections and should be identified by name rather than glossed. A few electrical panel brands from the period carry known issues and are worth naming by manufacturer. Original windows are single-glazed or early double-glazed and fail at the seal. And federal law requires lead-based paint disclosure on housing built before 1978, which covers most of this subdivision and all of its first section.

A camera inspection of the sewer lateral is the highest-value small expense available on housing of this age. Clay and early plastic laterals from the 1970s are prime candidates for root intrusion, and the difference between finding that before closing and after is measured in thousands.

Which district serves it is an address question

School districts across the wider Ypsilanti area follow neither the township lines nor the city line. Ypsilanti Community, Lincoln Consolidated and Van Buren all serve parts of it, and Ann Arbor Public Schools reaches into Superior Township on the northwest side.

That produces situations in every direction: properties with Ypsilanti mailing addresses in the Ann Arbor district, properties in Ypsilanti Township served by Lincoln Consolidated, and properties in Superior Township that could plausibly be described as either Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti depending on which fact you lead with.

The rule that follows is the same one that applies across this county.

The township, and the plant that made it

Ypsilanti Township surrounds the City of Ypsilanti and is a separate government with its own taxes and services — township rates rather than city rates. Its parks system runs to about thirty parks and facilities totalling more than 900 acres.

What made the township what it is happened in 1941, when Ford built a plant at Willow Run on ground that had been farm fields. Construction ran from 1940 to 1942 and on completion it was the largest factory under a single roof anywhere in the world. Employment peaked at 42,500, and by 1944 the line was turning out a B-24 Liberator bomber about every hour. Tens of thousands of workers arrived in a rural township within a few years.

Subdivisions like this one belong to the long tail of that. By the 1970s the township was building conventional suburban housing on farm ground for a workforce that had arrived thirty years earlier and stayed, and Textile Road — an old farm road — was being platted on both sides.

An unresolved question in the township

Anyone buying in Ypsilanti Township in 2026 should know about this, because it is live, it is large, and it is not settled.

The University of Michigan is planning a computational research center and data center on a 144-acre site along the Huron River in the township, developed with Los Alamos National Laboratory at a reported cost of around $1.25 billion. The university describes it as a high-performance computing facility supporting medicine, climate science, energy and national security, and the plans include a classified building of roughly 240,000 square feet alongside a smaller non-classified one. The university closed on the 124-acre Textile Road parcel in March 2026, adding it to twenty adjoining acres it already owned, and confirmed Textile Road as the selected site in August.

The township has opposed it formally. Its Board of Trustees passed a resolution against the project at a special meeting on March 31, 2026, and on August 18 unanimously adopted a six-month moratorium on large electric utility structures, having also examined a moratorium on power transmission as a way of slowing the project. Public meetings through the summer drew large crowds, and residents and officials have continued to press against it.

What matters for a buyer is that a project of this scale, contested by the local government, is genuinely unresolved, and that its outcome could affect traffic, utility infrastructure and the character of parts of the township. Anyone buying here should check the current status directly with the township.

Buying or selling here

A large subdivision of consistent-era housing produces a real comparable set, which is an advantage over neighborhoods where every sale is a one-off. The discipline required is matching on house type and on plat section before comparing anything.

For a seller, dated documentation of the systems work is the argument, because on fifty-year-old housing it is the only thing that separates one house from another. Assemble it before the photographs rather than producing it under negotiation.

For a buyer, that same documentation is the negotiation and its absence is information. Read the recorded restrictions for the correct plat, camera the sewer lateral.