Who decided your subdivision needed a pickleball court?
Nobody voted on it the way you'd expect. There was no city council session, no line item buried in a Northville budget document, no contractor bid posted for public comment. If you've walked past North Park lately and noticed fresh white lines painted across a corner of the parking lot with a net strung between them, that decision came from six of your neighbors, unpaid, deciding how to spend money you already handed over in dues.
Most descriptions of Lexington Commons repeat the same three facts: north of Eight Mile Road, about a mile from downtown Northville, close to Maybury State Park. All accurate, all available on a dozen real estate sites, none of it explaining why a food truck shows up in a parking lot every June or why your association spent money on court paint instead of something else. The real answer is that Lexington Commons isn't one neighborhood with one homeowners association. It's five separate entities sharing a name, two of which own actual park land, run entirely by residents who show up to a meeting most people skip.
Five Names, One Address
If you've ever tried to find "the" Lexington Commons HOA website, you've probably landed on more than one. That's because there isn't a single governing body. The Lexington Commons Association, known as LCA, covers 163 houses split across three subdivisions: East, West, and South. Layered on top of that are two separate condo associations, North and South, adding another 192 units. The North Lexington Condo Homes section alone accounts for 95 of those units, sitting north of Eight Mile and west of Taft, just south of the association's North Park.
The South condo side operates under its own name entirely. The Lexington Condo Homes Association, or LCHA, was established in 1972 at the northwest corner of Eight Mile and Taft, and it runs its own meetings, its own board, and its own newsletter separate from the LCA that governs the detached houses.
Practically, this means the association you actually belong to depends on which side of Taft Road your home sits on, and whether you own a house or a condo. Send a maintenance question to the wrong board and it goes nowhere. Skip the wrong annual meeting and you miss the vote that sets your own dues.
Thirteen Acres and Seven Acres
The houses portion of LCA owns two parcels outright: North Park, at 13 acres, and South Park, at 7 acres. North Commons houses are split by Taft Road into what residents call East Commons and West Commons. The west side sits just north of North Park itself, while the east side backs up to Cooke School on Taft Road. South Commons sits entirely south of Eight Mile, and its park runs between Lexington Boulevard on the east and Clement Road on the west, with two additional lots on Wood Hill Road rounding out the association's footprint.
Dues for 2025 ran $240 per house and $120 per condo, paid annually, and the association is direct about where that money goes: upkeep and improvements to the two parks, not much else. There's no clubhouse, no pool, no amenity fee layered on top. What you get for that number is grass mowed, playground equipment maintained, and whatever project the board decides is worth funding that year.
The Court That's Still on Trial
One recent project was pickleball. The board painted lines and installed a net in the North Park parking lot, first come first served, restricted to Lexington Commons members. The language on the association's own site is worth sitting with: if the court sees enough use, the board says it will look for a more permanent solution in the coming years. Translation: this isn't a finished amenity. It's a pilot program painted onto existing asphalt to see whether demand justifies building something real.
That framing changes how you should think about a court you might drive past without a second look. It's not infrastructure the association is committed to. It's a bet the board is making with your dues, and whether it becomes something more depends on whether people actually show up and play.
People did show up, at least for the season's kickoff. Last year's Summer Kick-Off ran on Thursday, June 12, at North Park, with a food truck serving Mexican food from 5:30 to 7:30 that operated cash only. The pickleball court was open for use, and neighbors were encouraged to bring their own outdoor games. A week later, the association's garage sale permit covered a Thursday-through-Saturday window from June 19 to 21, open to every house and condo in the association at once, meaning a single weekend turned most of North and South Commons into a coordinated sale rather than scattered individual signs.
A few of the association's recurring fixed points, based on how it runs its own calendar:
- A spring Easter Egg Hunt that last drew close to 50 kids searching for roughly 1,500 eggs, organized by neighbors Matthew and Andrea Guibord, who ordered and stuffed the eggs themselves.
- A June Summer Kick-Off food truck event at North Park, paired with open pickleball court time.
- A late-June garage sale weekend covering the full association.
- An annual meeting each fall, where dues, budget, and board seats are decided.
None of this is programmed by a management company. It's organized by residents who also mow their own lawns and drive their own kids to school.
Who's Actually Deciding This
The board that makes these calls is small and entirely volunteer. John, a Northville resident since 2013 who works as Director of Non-ferrous Commercial Trading at Ferrous Processing and Trading, has pushed for using the association's common spaces more fully rather than letting them sit underused. Andrea has served as treasurer since 2016 and has lived in the LCHA community since 2005, making her one of the longer-tenured voices on financial decisions. Spase Petrovski, known locally as Steve, has been part of the Northville community for more than a decade and brings a construction background to a board that regularly has to weigh repair costs against new projects.
The board changed hands recently. Longtime member Todd Farmer served through 2024 before stepping down, and in 2025 neighbors welcomed Megan Gardner, a South Commons resident since 2015 who works as a nurse practitioner, as the board's newest member. She now serves as president.
A subdivision's amenities rarely arrive by accident. Someone decided the court was worth the paint, someone decided the food truck was worth the cash-only hassle, and someone will decide next year whether either survives.
The Meeting That Sets the Next Budget
Lexington Commons holds its annual meeting every fall at Cooke School on Taft Road, with registration starting at 6:30 p.m. and the meeting itself beginning at 7. Last year's fell on Wednesday, November 5. If you can't attend, the association accepts proxy forms, either the mailed copy or the version posted on its own site, so your vote still counts on budget items and board seats even if you're out of town.
This is the meeting where the $240 and $120 dues figures get revisited, where a decision about the pickleball court's future could get made official, and where whoever sits on the board next gets chosen by whoever bothers to show up or return a form. Watch the association's site for this year's date and agenda.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of the amenities in Lexington Commons are guaranteed the way they might be in a subdivision with a professional management company and a fixed capital plan. They exist because a rotating group of unpaid neighbors keeps deciding they're worth the effort, one budget year at a time. That's true of the pickleball court, the Easter egg count, and the food truck's cash-only policy, which is really just a small board managing logistics with limited volunteer hours.
If you want the court to become permanent instead of a striped parking lot experiment, using it is part of how that happens. If you want a say in whether next year's dues go toward that or something else entirely, the fall meeting at Cooke School is where that gets decided, not a website, not a developer, not the city of Northville.
Gardner & Gesch works across Northville's neighborhoods, including this one, and pays attention to the details that make a subdivision function day to day, not just the ones that show up on a listing sheet. If you're curious how Lexington Commons compares to other Northville communities, or you're weighing a move within the area, reach out to Gardner & Gesch and let's talk through what actually matters on the ground.
