The HOA era: covenants, associations, and the names residents use

2004 – TODAY

The plats govern themselves now, and the record of it is litigation: the Tribune's "Fenced in by covenants" (2004) is the era's set piece — in Fox Chase at Knollwood, a resident's wooden porch built against covenants requiring concrete, kept after the fight; and the Quail Ridge at Knollwood homeowners association's lawsuit against Tyrone Willingham, then Notre Dame's head football coach, over a five-foot ornamental fence the covenants barred. The article's point for this section is jurisdictional: by 2004 the operative government of the Knollwood ring's daily geography — what may be built, fenced, parked or planted on a lot — was the covenant regime of the plats themselves, enforced by associations whose names ("Quail Ridge at Knollwood HOA," in the Tribune's usage) residents use interchangeably with the neighborhoods'. The pattern repeats across the map: the Farmington Hills Homeowners Association appears in the 2019 plat proceedings below as a remonstrating body — an association acting as a neighborhood's civic voice in a county hearing, in a place with no municipal government of its own to speak for it.

Resident names and plat names are two geographies, printed as the record distinguishes them: the umbrella name is the clearest case — residents live in "the Communities of Knollwood" or simply "in Knollwood," while the plat book holds twenty separate instruments, from Knollwood Addition A to Woodford Trails at Knollwood, and the parcel file adds its own variants (Brendon Hills in speech and sworn testimony, Brendon Hills Park in the legal descriptions; "Grangers Oak Ridge" and "Granger's Oak Ridge" in adjacent sections of the same plat). The school catchments supply the other resident geography — a Granger address is located, in daily use, by its elementary school (Mary Frank, Prairie Vista, Horizon, Northpoint) as readily as by its plat — and the Schools file carries that map at full size. this section prints the plat names as the county files them and the resident names as the press and the sworn record use them, and marks the difference where the two diverge, because the divergence is itself a fact of the place: an unincorporated community's neighborhoods have no official names at all, and the plat book is the closest thing to a gazetteer it will ever have.

Sources

1. South Bend Tribune, "Fenced in by covenants" (2004), as catalogued in the Michiana newspaper catalogue (MBRL/ProQuest) — the Fox Chase porch and the Quail Ridge association's fence suit, as stated.
2. Area Plan Commission Plat Committee record, petition 7041-18-P (17 January 2019) — the Farmington Hills Homeowners Association's remonstrance, read in the Bradford Shores article below.
3. St. Joseph County parcel record, read November 2026 — the plat-name variants as the file carries them.