Wayne County holds Detroit itself and the ring of suburbs to its west and south: Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Livonia, Westland, Taylor, Canton and the Grosse Pointes. It also holds some of the oldest housing in the state, on flat lakebed ground that drains slowly, and nearly every city here has its own permit for work at the street. This page sets out both.
Detroit, Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Livonia, Westland, Garden City, Redford, Taylor, Southgate, Wyandotte, Allen Park, Lincoln Park, Canton, Plymouth, Northville, Romulus, and Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Park, Farms and Woods. Send the address even if your town is not listed.
Most of the county sits on the Erie-Huron lake plain, the flat floor of a glacial lake. The federal soil survey describes the soils of that plain as very deep, mostly loamy or clayey, and poorly to very poorly drained. In plain terms, water that gets under a driveway here does not leave in a hurry. The Rouge River and its branches drain about 466 square miles of the county into the Detroit River, and much of that watershed is roofs, roads and parking.
The winter makes that slow drainage matter. The National Weather Service's current normals for Detroit put the average January high just above freezing and the average low around 19F, with about 45 inches of snow a season. So the typical winter day crosses the freezing line, and water sitting in a crack or trapped in wet base freezes and thaws over and over. The first autumn freeze arrives around 26 October on average and the last spring freeze around 22 April, which is the frame every sealing job here has to fit inside.
Census estimates put more than a third of Detroit's homes as built in 1939 or earlier, and nearly four in five before 1960. Those lots are narrow, many drives are a single car wide, and a lot of garages sit at the back of the lot. A long, narrow drive squeezed between two houses is mostly edges and hand work, and its surface is often patched in several generations of asphalt.
Dearborn Heights, Westland, Livonia and Taylor filled in mainly between the 1940s and the 1970s, and their streets tend to age together, drive by drive. Canton is far newer, and the township itself owns none of its roughly 410 miles of road: by its own figures about 65 percent belong to the county, 5 percent to the state and 30 percent to homeowner associations. In a Canton subdivision, the street in front of your house may well be your association's asphalt.
Taylor's list is the one that names asphalt on private land outright, and Westland and Dearborn permit private driveways as well, so a replacement or a new drive in those cities is quoted with its permit. Sealing an existing drive is not described as permit work on any of these pages; where the wording is unclear the city is asked first.
We do not do concrete. A lot of drives and nearly all public approaches in Wayne County are concrete, and that is a different trade.
No. Narrow drives take more hand work at the edges, which the quote accounts for, but they seal the same way.
Yes, as association work, with a written proposal for the board.
Detroit allows one driveway per residential dwelling, so usually not.
Next door: Oakland County to the north and Macomb County to the north east.
