Ann Arbor Reconsidering Proposal To Ban Some Types Of Home-based Businesses
ANN ARBOR, MI — Working from home has become the norm for many people during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s prompting Ann Arbor officials to consider new regulations for operating home-based businesses.
It’s been a topic of discussion at recent city meetings and the Planning Commission voted April 6 to recommend City Council approve new rules banning several types of home-based businesses, such as machine shops, metal working, recording studios, body piercing/tattoo parlors and furniture refinishing.
The commission also recommended types of home-based businesses to permit, such as computer repair, marijuana cultivation, hair salons, therapy/counseling, personal fitness training, architecture and accounting/tax preparation.
But after several residents complained the proposed changes are too restrictive — particularly the ban on home recording studios and metal working/machine shops — the commission voted April 20 to take a step back and reconsider.
The home-based business ordinance is now due back on the commission’s agenda May 18 before it could advance to City Council, and officials are welcoming more input.
Ann Arbor musician John Churchville was among several residents who spoke at a recent meeting, telling commissioners he has worked from home the last year, doing virtual shows from the music studio in his basement.
“I’ve gone in one year from 50-plus gigs a year down to one in the last year, and I work in my home studio, and it is — I would consider — a recording studio,” he said.
He’s also a music teacher and has spent a decade teaching students how to set up home recording studios, he said.
“I have students who have music on Spotify who have won national awards creating music with their laptops in home studios,” he said, urging city officials to reconsider prohibiting home-based businesses like recording studios.
Planning officials continued to discuss the issue in committee this week. Rather than list specific types of home-based businesses to permit and prohibit, they’re now leaning toward just having standards for all home-based businesses to follow, said Sarah Mills, Planning Commission chair.
That includes restrictions on size, hours, noise, dust, odor, vibrations, outside storage and customer trips.
There are current restrictions stating a home-based business can have no more than one non-resident employee and officials are considering keeping that.
They’re also considering keeping language from the draft approved April 6 stating mechanized equipment can be used only in a completely enclosed building.
The April 6 draft also included regulatory exemptions for certain types of home occupations, including artists, sculptors, composers and crafters not selling their products on the premises, home offices with no client visits and phone answering/messaging services.
As for deliveries to home-based businesses, officials considered limiting them to the hours of 8 a.M. To 8 p.M., but they’re now backing away from that, given that a home-based business can’t control, for example, when Amazon delivers a package.
Still, client visits would be limited to 8 a.M. To 8 p.M. Under what’s being discussed, Mills said.
She expects the next ordinance draft to allow up to four client visits at a time, but no more than about 20-24 client visits per day. That would be an increase from the current limit of 10 business-related vehicle trips per day.
Existing city code states no more than 25% of a home can be used for a home business. Officials have proposed keeping that, though allowing them to be bigger — potentially up to 2,000 square feet, though no bigger than the home — if in an accessory structure such as a garage. But there could be no outside storage of goods or heavy equipment.
Officials emphasize the rules would apply to people running operations from which they earn income, not hobbyists.
Brett Lenart, the city’s planning manager, explained the impetus for updating the rules for home-based businesses at the Planning Commission’s April 6 meeting.
“This was brought to my attention sort of in the context of, I’ll say, a crazy year perhaps, and specifically a year where a lot more people are probably working from home,” he said.
The existing city code lists some types of occupations that may or may not be approvable as home-based businesses, but there’s ambiguity, Lenart said, explaining his reason for proposing longer lists of specific types of permitted and prohibited home-based businesses to be more clear.
Other proposed changes aim to address questions that have come up regarding enforcement of rules for home-based businesses. For example, the current code allowing up to 10 business-related trips per day doesn’t really distinguish between customer visits and deliveries, Lenart said.
Mills said she can’t speak for the full Planning Commission, but she doesn’t think there are any specific types of home-based businesses the commission wants to ban at this point, though it would be tricky for some to meet the proposed standards.
The city’s move to revisit the ordinance didn’t come about because of complaints or problems about specific types of home-based businesses, she said.
“It was more that, in this move to work from home, people had questions and some of the standards were vague, and the list of enumerated occupations that were allowed don’t cover all of the things that people may be doing from home now,” she said.
In the process of trying to modernize the ordinance, officials took a model example from the American Planning Association, Mills said.
Commissioners said they’ve heard loud and clear from the public the ordinance needs more work, they made a mistake in voting on it earlier this month, and they welcome more input.
For example, though home dentist offices are not allowed under current city code, they could be under changes now being considered, Mills said, adding it would be helpful for the commission to know how residents feel about that.
Ann Arbor resident Julian Carpenter told commissioners he has started a small specialty manufacturing company in the city and has an industrial property for it, but he works with several people with home-based machine shops.
“And they, across the board, are contributors to the community and the economy of this area,” he said, adding they’re very respectful and their home-based operations are quiet.
“Most people don’t even know that they have any equipment in their home to make things,” he said. “And these are old physics professors from the university, extremely specialized machinists from the industry who have a different career now. But as a manufacturer in the area, I and our other partner companies use these home machine shops occasionally and regularly for one small job here, one small job there, and they are a larger part of this community and economy than you might think.”
Ann Arbor resident Michael Flynn, owner of FunExhibits.Com, said he makes “amazing and fun” toys and art exhibits for museums, using metalworking tools to make prototypes in his garage before his products are sold around the world.
“In Ann Arbor, there really should be a haven for inventors,” he said, cautioning against enacting any regulations that could shut down such home-based operations.
The existing city code states these occupations “may qualify” as allowable home-based businesses: accountant, architect, artist, author, consultant, tailor, individual musical instrument instruction, individual academic tutoring, millinery, preserving and home cooking. And it explicitly prohibits only “vehicle repair or painting; office, medical or dental.”
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Smyrna Relaxes Rules For Home Businesses
Owners of Smyrna home businesses no longer will have to seek signatures from their neighbors before the city will approve their businesses - unless they reside in an apartment.
This change and a few others were approved 7-0 in April by the Smyrna City Council.
A few apartment complexes within Smyrna do not allow home businesses to operate in the complex, according to Community Development Director Russell Martin, Planner I Caitlin Crowe and Business License Officer Kelly Moon in a memo.
However, other apartments prefer to be informed of incoming home businesses to their complex, they added.
“Either way, it is advantageous to keep the apartment radius letter requirement,” the memo said.
As for homes that are not apartments, “by continuing to require the radius letter signatures, many citizens have stated an invasion of privacy and have questioned the rationale behind obtaining their neighbor’s signatures,” they added.
Other changes are to allow one-chair beauty salons and emergency consultations and treatments in the home by physicians, dentists and lawyers.
“Code enforcement cannot prove if an interaction is an emergency or not,” the memo added.
As of January 2019, 21 percent of home occupations are internet sales; and 76 percent are considered administrative, including construction, catering and mobile car wash, Martin, Crowe and Moon said in the memo.
Currently, home business licenses are handled administratively through Business License Officer Kelly Moon and do not go in front of the Mayor and Council at any point since 97 percent of the businesses are administrative or internet sales - whether new or a renewal, the memo added.
Information: SmyrnaCity.Legistar.Com/calendar.Aspx
How Small Businesses Survived The Pandemic
Many found ways to turn their local customer base into a national one.
May 2, 2021, 7:38 PM
• 7 min read
Share to FacebookEmail this articleAs in-person experiences, such as shopping and going out to eat, were halted for a significant amount of time during the pandemic, small businesses had to find ways to survive.
“We were gearing up to offer wine tastings, cocktail making and cooking classes in people’s homes, but when the pandemic hit, it upended our entire business model and plans,” Michael Wolkon, co-founder of Night Inn, told ABC News. “So then we started in June of 2020 offering virtual wine tastings to individual groups at home, as well as corporate clients who wanted to do virtual happy hours across the entire country.”
Night Inn, founded by Wolkon, Rena Ogura and Ryan Lane also turned these virtual tastings into a way to give back to an industry that was so badly hit by the pandemic by hiring bartenders and sommeliers who were laid off.
“They're really excited about this opportunity to completely work on their own time and make an additional income stream,” Wolkon said.
People dine in plastic tents for social distancing at a restaurant in Manhattan on October 15, 2020, in New York City.
More importantly, they found that their virtual experiences were giving people the togetherness they longed for as they were separated for months.
“We love the idea and the feeling of community that you can have just by being in a private space with the people you care about," Ogura said. "What the online model demonstrated to us and what we've heard from our guests is that this has been one of the very few ways in which they've felt truly connected and truly together with their families."
“We have our professional from California talking to people in New York," Lane added. "And that family in New York has cousins out in Denver, and it brings everyone together just from one sitting. It was one of the hidden gems from virtual that we discovered."
Night Inn continues to help industry professionals like restaurateurs, bartenders and sommeliers as they plan to expand to in-person tastings and experiences with a COVID-19 protocol set in place.
Jeanette Mulvey, editor-in-chief of CO—, a publication by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said she has seen this trend happen over time with online and e-commerce sites.
“The pandemic has allowed many small businesses to shift from local-only to serving a national audience. I’ve seen this over and over again where businesses -- out of necessity -- moved to e-commerce and grew a national customer base,” Mulvey told ABC News.
Eliza Blank, founder and CEO of The Sill, a plant delivery business that also offers educational workshops, never expected something like the pandemic to happen. She knew adjustments needed to be made from how she initially founded the business in 2012, she said, and felt she needed to utilize its online space more to build a sense of a community that the pandemic had taken away.
Blank moved The Sill's workshops online, and she found that people were "craving a connection over something that was a shared experience."
“We were able to offer this community not only the plant products that they needed and craved, but the platform to then connect with each other and have that shared experience when so many of us became socially distanced and weren't really engaging socially in real life,” Blank told ABC News.
“The upside of the online experience is that you are able to connect with people who you wouldn't naturally connect with,” Blank added. “Whether it was to beautify their space, to nurture or take care of something, to bring the outdoors in or, quite frankly, just like as a hobby, people were using this as a way to also cope with all the spare time we had in quarantine."
Even as things slowly return to normal, the businesses are still working to find more ways to innovate, and they also plan to maintain the changes they had to make in order to keep their businesses alive.
“The pandemic forced businesses to innovate and evolve more quickly than they normally would," Mulvey said, "but those that did it successfully will come out with more robust and resilient businesses."
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