Westlawn

A 1990 build sits inside the polybutylene window

This is the single most consequential era question in this region's housing, and a build around 1990 sits squarely inside it.

It was inexpensive and easy to install, and it developed a reputation for failing at fittings and joints. Some of it has performed for decades; some has not. What matters is that a house of this age may have it, and the only way to know is to have the piping identified by material during the inspection rather than inferred from anything at all.

Where it has been replaced, that is a documented selling point worth stating plainly rather than leaving for an inspector to discover — it removes the largest question a 1990 house raises.

At around thirty-five years the first full replacement cycle has passed and the second is beginning. Original roofs are well past a typical asphalt shingle service life, so a roof here should have been done at least once — ask when, by whom, and what warranty came with it. Original furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters are long beyond expectancy. Original double-glazed windows show seal failure as fogging between the panes.

The item specific to this period is exterior cladding and its edges. Hardboard and early composite products perform according to how their ends, edges and penetrations were sealed and how the ground drains away, and thirty-five years is long enough for careless detailing to have declared itself. The bottom courses and anywhere a deck meets a wall are where to look.

Generous lots on a compact house, which is an unusual combination

Houses averaging around 1,500 square feet on notably generous lots is a ratio worth thinking about, because it produces both an opportunity and a caution.

The opportunity is expansion. A modest house on a large lot has room to grow, and additions are one of the more reliable ways to add value where the neighborhood supports the resulting size. Whether that is possible is settled by two documents, not one: the township zoning, which sets setbacks, lot coverage and height, and the recorded restrictions on the plat, which frequently set minimum floor areas, architectural approval and limits on outbuildings. The stricter of the two generally governs in practice, and both should be read before drawing anything.

There is a third constraint people forget: where a property is on a septic system, the drain field takes up ground and cannot be built over, which limits where an addition or an outbuilding can go regardless of what zoning permits. On a large lot in a township that is a real planning question rather than a technicality.

The caution is the comparable analysis. A large lot is one of the harder adjustments to make well, because lot value does not scale linearly with area — the first quarter-acre is worth far more per square foot than the fourth. An automated valuation handles this badly, and a lot that is twice the neighborhood norm will not be worth twice the lot component.

A generous lot is also more ground to maintain, and where mature trees stand near the house, periodic inspection, pruning and eventual removal are the owner's cost with no shared budget behind them.

Washtenaw Golf Club, founded with three tomato cans

The course between Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor has one of the better origin stories in Michigan golf, and it is documented rather than folklore.

In 1899 three people — Cora Henry, I. Newton Swift and Daniel L. Quirk Jr. — persuaded a local farmer to let them push three empty tomato cans into his freshly cut hay field west of the city, and invited their friends over for a game. It went well enough that a year later fifteen men from Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor formed the Washtenaw Country Club in Ypsilanti Township. That makes it one of the oldest clubs in the state.

The part that matters to a neighboring property owner is more recent. The club was private for most of its history, and an ownership change in 2019 opened it as a public course.

That is worth understanding as a change in the character of a neighbor rather than as trivia. A private club and a public daily-fee course generate different volumes of traffic, different patterns through the day and week, and a different relationship with the surrounding streets. Where a neighborhood grew up beside a private club, the change is real and it is recent enough that long-standing owners will have opinions worth hearing.

It also changes what proximity means. Nobody living nearby had playing rights at a private club; now anybody can book a tee time, neighbors included. That is a genuine gain in amenity terms and a genuine change in activity, and both belong in an honest description.

It bears on the durability question too. A course under new ownership operating commercially is privately held business land — the least durable tier of protected open space, and the ground most golf-course neighborhoods actually face. Courses do close, and when one does the land is usually proposed for something else. Who owns it now, and whether anything recorded restricts its use to golf or open space, are answerable questions, and worth asking before rather than after.

Living beside a course, in practical terms

For a house that actually adjoins play, several specifics apply that appear in no listing.

Errant golf balls are a real and recurring matter for properties along a fairway, and liability for the damage they do is not always where people assume — it depends on the recorded documents, on state law and on the club's own rules. Some positions are far worse than others: the landing area of a driving hole is a different proposition from the back of a green. Where a house backs onto play, ask about it directly rather than reading it in a listing.

Maintenance operations start early. Mowing, irrigation and course preparation happen at dawn through the season, which is a genuine daily fact and is not audible at an afternoon showing.

Course chemistry is a reasonable thing to ask about, since a maintained course is a managed landscape with an irrigation and treatment program running alongside the property.

A public course brings more traffic through the day and week than a private club does, and the parking and access patterns differ with it.

Against all that, an outlook over a fairway is open, green, quiet outside operating hours, and free of anybody building on it while the course operates. It is genuinely one of the better views a house can have, which is why people pay for it — and within one neighborhood, whether a house fronts the course, faces internal streets or backs onto a road is a substantial and priceable difference that square footage does not capture.

The Washtenaw Avenue corridor

Washtenaw Avenue is the principal road between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and one of the busiest commercial corridors in the county. Being just south of it is the convenience of this position and its trade-off in a single fact.

The convenience is substantial: everyday shopping, services and both city centers are reachable without joining a highway, and US-23 crosses the corridor a short distance west.

Traffic is the other side. How much reaches a particular house depends on distance from the corridor, orientation and what stands between, and within a single neighborhood those differences are large and are not reflected in square footage. Standing in the main room or the backyard at a weekday rush hour, with the windows open, settles it far better than any description.

A corridor position also brings development pressure, which bears directly on the durability of any open ground nearby. Where a view is part of the reason to buy, the inquiry worth making is who owns that ground and what the township's zoning and master plan say about it — because unbuilt private land beside a busy commercial corridor is the least protected category there is.

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 or the analysis imports an error that nothing in the paperwork flags.

School assignment follows a third line again and tracks neither the municipal nor the postal boundary. This part of the county sits where the Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti Community and Lincoln Consolidated boundaries approach one another, so the answer is genuinely not guessable from the address. Match comparable sales on district as well as on 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 piping and the lot are the two things this neighborhood turns on.

For a seller, documentation that the supply piping has been replaced answers the largest question a 1990 house raises, and a dated roof answers the second. Where the lot is genuinely larger than the neighborhood norm, saying so with a measured figure rather than the word generous gives an appraiser something to work with.