Commerce Township basements, new subdivisions on old lake country
Commerce was resort country first. People came out for Union Lake, Commerce Lake, Lower Straits and the Huron River, which runs roughly north to south through the township, and cottages went up along the shorelines. The village of Commerce at Commerce and Sleeth roads was platted in 1836, and most of Proud Lake Recreation Area sits inside the township.
Then the subdivisions came. The township had about 35,000 people in 2000 and passed 43,000 by 2020, and the typical house on the market here today was built around the late 1990s. The state once planned to carry M-5 north from its end in Commerce all the way to I-75, then dropped the idea, partly because of how many lakes were in the way.
The late-1990s subdivision basement
If you live in one of the newer subdivisions, you probably have a deep poured-concrete basement with egress windows and a sump pit that was there from day one. Builders here generally did a decent job on the walls. The trouble comes from the ground around them.
Backfill is the big one. The soil pushed back against a new foundation is loose, and over ten or twenty years it settles. The ring of dirt along the house drops a few inches, the lawn ends up sloping toward the wall, and every downspout that empties near the foundation now feeds water straight down to the footing. Fix the grade, extend the downspouts, and a lot of these basements dry right up. Our exterior drainage page covers that work.
Then there’s the egress well. Leaves pile up, the drain at the bottom clogs or was never really connected, and water pools against the window until it finds its way in around the frame. Cheap fix. Annoying leak.
Poured walls crack too
Poured concrete shrinks as it cures, and most foundations from this era have a few hairline cracks, often running down from the corner of a window. Most never leak. The ones that do are good candidates for polyurethane injection from the inside, which fills the crack all the way through the wall. Sometimes a crack is just a crack, and we’ll tell you to leave it alone.
Near the lakes and the river
The closer you are to Union Lake, Commerce Lake or the Huron, the higher the water table and the harder your sump pump works. Some pumps in these neighborhoods run every few minutes for weeks each spring. That’s not a defect, but it shortens a pump’s life, and twenty-some years in, a lot of original builder pumps are near the end. We’d replace a tired pump before it quits, and add a backup on its own switch.
The older lakefront streets are a different picture. Many of those houses started as cottages, some still run on septic, and the basements are block or a crawl space. The township has been forming sewer special assessment districts for some of these streets, so know where your line is headed before anyone digs near it.
Distance, and what to expect
Commerce is near the western edge of where we work, roughly 45 minutes to an hour from Shelby Township. We still come out for emergencies at any hour. Estimates are free, and if a grading fix is all you need, that’s what we’ll recommend. A newer house rarely needs a full system. More often it needs one crack sealed, one well cleaned out and a better pump, and we’d rather do that well than oversell.
