Whose signature actually authorized the concrete crew idling outside your house this summer? If you assumed it came from Bloomfield Township's public works department, you'd only be half right, and only on the paperwork. The real decision was made by your neighbors, in a petition that circulated door to door, months before a single barricade went up.
Bloomfield Village has been rebuilding its own streets section by section for the better part of a decade, and the process runs almost entirely through the residents themselves. The Bloomfield Village Association, the same nonprofit that has governed the neighborhood's look and feel since the 1960s, also runs the road program at villageroads.org. If you've wondered why one block got new curbs two summers ago while the block next to it is still waiting, the answer isn't township scheduling. It's a vote.
A Village That Runs Itself
Bloomfield Village was laid out in 1924 by developer Judson Bradway as a nonpolitical entity inside Bloomfield Township, and Bradway personally controlled architectural approvals and upkeep through 1966. When residents organized their own fire and police protection at the start of World War II, they formed the Bloomfield Village Protective Association, which incorporated as a Michigan nonprofit in 1942 and was renamed the Bloomfield Village Association in 1966, taking over enforcement of the neighborhood's building and use restrictions and its maintenance fund.
That structure still runs the neighborhood today. A 12-member volunteer Board of Trustees serves staggered three-year terms, meets monthly, and holds an annual meeting every May. A quarterly Village Bulletin keeps roughly 1,000 homes across the neighborhood's one square mile, bounded by Quarton Road, Maple Road, Lahser Road, and the Birmingham city line, informed of what the board is doing. A Village Manager handles day-to-day operations, and residents also run a Village Social Club and a Village Garden Club. Roads are simply the newest thing this same self-governing apparatus has taken on.
Five Colors, Five Separate Votes
Because rebuilding every street in the Village at once would be both disruptive and expensive, the Road Commission split the network into five sections, each roughly two to three miles, named by color. Each section decides on its own timeline whether to move forward, and one section voting no has no effect on the others.
| Section | Status as of 2026 |
|---|---|
| Pink | Completed |
| Blue | Completed |
| Gold | Completed |
| Yellow | Completed |
| Green | Petitions passed with 51.28 percent support; construction underway this year |
The Green section's path is the clearest window into how this actually works. Petitions went out in July 2025. Bloomfield Township's Board of Trustees held its first public hearing on February 9, 2026, and after hearing from residents on both sides, voted unanimously to send the project to the Road Commission for bidding. A second public hearing followed on April 27, 2026, and construction moved forward this year on the expectation that bids would land within 10 percent of the original petition estimate.
The financing detail that matters for your wallet: the Village chose to finance through Bloomfield Township rather than the Road Commission of Oakland County, using an equal-cost-per-parcel approach already applied to the Pink, Blue, Gold, and Yellow sections. And that financing has occasionally worked in residents' favor. When the Kirkway and earlier Village road projects wrapped under budget, Township trustees authorized partial refunds in March 2026. Township Treasurer Schostak put it plainly: "It's the residents' money, and every dollar of surplus is going back to the homeowners." That same announcement noted an additional phase touching both Bloomfield Village and the neighboring Vernor Estates was expected to follow a similar process later in 2026.
Curbs Here, Ditches There
Vernor Estates sits close enough to Bloomfield Village that the two projects can look interchangeable from the street. They aren't. Vernor's streets are built on drainage ditches, so its rebuild skips the curb and storm drain work that defines the Village's project. Vernor also isn't adding new underdrains on most of its streets, where the Village is. And because Vernor never had sidewalks, its project has no ADA ramps to rebuild, while the Village's does.
None of that is cosmetic. It reflects two different original construction standards from two different eras of development, and it means a Village resident watching a paving crew a few blocks over in Vernor is watching a genuinely different scope of work, not a preview of what's coming to their own street.
The Two Weeks You Won't Have a Driveway
For residents on a street that's actually in construction, the process follows a set sequence, and knowing the order helps you plan around it rather than get surprised by it.
- The contractor removes your existing curb and driveway approach. This starts a roughly 14-day clock during which you won't have vehicle access to your driveway.
- A temporary stone approach goes down, though there can be a gap of an hour or two between removal of the old approach and placement of the temporary one.
- The crew pours the new concrete curb, then the new driveway approach.
- Concrete cures for about 7 to 10 days, with barricades staying up until it's strong enough for vehicle traffic. Curing time shifts with temperature and weather.
- Paving happens later, in two separate layers. During each layer, the street closes completely and driveway access is cut off entirely, not just restricted.
- On paving days, there is no street parking at all. Cars left on the street after 7 a.m. are subject to towing.
Notice comes in two forms: weekly construction updates posted to the project blog at villageroads.org, and door notices placed roughly 48 hours before your specific driveway loses access.
What This Looks Like on Your Block Right Now
The Green section's construction isn't theoretical this year. On July 23, 2026, the Birmingham-Bloomfield Bulletin reported that Allied Construction had begun curb installation on four Bloomfield Village Phase 1 streets, blocking driveway access for up to two weeks, exactly the sequence outlined above.
The crews working those streets, like every contractor who works inside the Village, operate under rules the Association itself wrote and enforces, not just township ordinance minimums. Work is permitted Monday through Saturday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Contractors are required to protect neighboring trees and shrubs with temporary fencing, avoid cutting utility lines, and restore any sidewalks or pavement they disturb to original condition or better once the job is done.
If your street hasn't seen a barricade yet, it likely will within the next construction season or two. When it does, the timeline above is close to exactly what you'll experience, because it's the same process the Village has now run five separate times since deciding, block by block, that it was worth doing.
That's the part easy to miss from the sidewalk. Bloomfield Village isn't waiting on anyone to notice its roads need attention. It has spent a century managing its own architecture, its own restrictions, and now its own infrastructure, one petition at a time.
Rob Haber has spent more than 15 years watching how decisions like these, made street by street inside Bloomfield Village, shape what the neighborhood becomes next. If you're curious what a section's road status might mean for a home you're watching in the Village, or just want a straight answer about the neighborhood, Let's Connect.
