What Traverse City’s Growth and Geography Demand from Retaining Walls
Traverse City has developed fast over the past two decades. That growth has pushed development onto sites that an earlier generation of builders would have avoided — steeper slopes, more challenging drainage patterns, sites where the grade work required to build a level pad created significant elevation differentials that now need to be held in place permanently. The neighborhoods rolling up from Munson Avenue toward the Old Mission Peninsula Road corridor, the hillside developments east of US-31, and the graded commercial sites throughout Grand Traverse County all have retaining walls that are doing real structural work.
When a retaining wall installation is done right from the start, it disappears into the property. It does its job without demanding attention. When it’s done wrong, it becomes a source of ongoing concern — settling after the first hard winter, weeping at the joints, bowing under the weight of saturated soil. We’ve assessed and replaced a number of walls in the Traverse City area that looked acceptable at installation and failed well short of what a properly built wall should deliver.