Late September is when the vacant land showings pick up. Leaves going, tourists gone, somebody standing on five acres off M-137 doing math on a pole barn. Park the boat, store the plow truck, build the house in two or three years once rates come down.
In a fair number of townships around here, you can't do it in that order.
Green Lake Township says no, then lists the ways around it
Section 4.11(A) of the Green Lake Township zoning ordinance: "An accessory building or structure shall only exist or be constructed where there exists a primary structure on the same parcel." No house, no barn. That's the rule in Interlochen and everything around it.
The exceptions are where the money is. If a permit for the primary structure has already been approved, a permit for the accessory structure can be approved alongside it, which is the normal path for people who are building for real. In the R-1, Village Residential and Lake Residential districts you can put up a standalone accessory structure with no house as long as it stays under 300 square feet, which buys you a shed. In R-5 and C-10 the ceiling is 1,200 square feet, which is a real building. And a parcel in bona fide agricultural use under the Michigan Right to Farm Act, at least five acres, zoned R-5 or C-10, can carry accessory structures with no dwelling at all.
That agricultural exception isn't old. It came in through ZOA #19-02, approved October 28, 2019 and effective November 22, 2019.
There's a demolition clause in the same section that catches people. If you tear down a house and leave the outbuilding, the demolition gets conditioned on a performance guarantee that the outbuilding comes down within two years unless a new primary structure is built or construction has made satisfactory progress. Teardown lots with a good pole barn on them get bought all the time up here, and that clause is easy to miss.
Grant Township, 1974
Drive south and the answer flips. Grant Township's zoning ordinance, Section 5, in language that has been sitting there since 1974: "Nothing contained herein shall be deemed to prevent the erection or maintenance of accessory buildings and uses, which are not at variance with the requirements of the particular zoning district."
That's the whole provision. There's no primary-structure condition in it anywhere.
Same county, two answers, about half an hour apart on US-131.
The camper question
The follow-up is always whether you can live in the camper on the lot while the house goes up. Green Lake handles that in Section 4.10, and the answer is a qualified yes with a clock on it. Temporary quarters are allowed during construction of a dwelling "for which all required permits have been issued," the structure has to meet setbacks, water and sewage have to be dealt with, and the use can't exceed six months from the date the permit is issued. The Zoning Administrator can renew it once for not more than another six months, for good cause shown.
Read that permit condition again, because the order matters. The temporary dwelling permit opens up once all the permits for the house are issued. If you're still waiting on the health department for a septic permit, you aren't in the window yet, and this time of year that wait is not short.
Camping on your own land without building anything is a separate rule and a stingier one. Sixty days in a calendar year, or thirty if there are no sanitary disposal facilities on site. Both numbers sit in the same section, amended by ZA #07-02, adopted April 14, 2008.
The agricultural exemption people misread
Somebody will tell you a pole barn needs no permit because it's agricultural. There's a real rule underneath that, and it's narrower than the version that gets repeated at the lumberyard.
Michigan's Stille-DeRossett-Hale Single State Construction Code Act defines "building" at MCL 125.1502a, and the definition excludes "a building, whether temporary or permanent, incidental to the use for agricultural purposes of the land on which the building is located if it is not used in the business of retail trade." A genuine farm building sits outside the state construction code, so no building permit.
Two things about that. It's a construction-code exemption and nothing else, so the township still regulates where the building goes and whether it belongs in that district at all. And "incidental to the use for agricultural purposes" is doing heavy work in that sentence. A heated shop with a bathroom where you store a boat and run a contracting business is not an agricultural building, and the zoning administrator who drives past it will say so.
I wouldn't buy a parcel on the theory that you'll qualify for the ag exemption. Buy it because the zoning already allows what you want, or buy it knowing the house comes first.
What to ask before you write the offer
Three calls, none of them long. Ask the township zoning administrator whether an accessory structure is allowed on a parcel with no dwelling, and if so up to what square footage in that specific district. Find out whether the township issues a temporary dwelling permit during construction and what the time limit is. Then confirm which office issues the permit, because it isn't always the township. In Green Lake, zoning permit applications for structures 200 square feet or larger go through Grand Traverse County's Construction Codes EPIC portal, and the township zoning administrator, Jason Hamilton, is at 231-276-9329 extension 106.
Finish deadlines are worth a question too. Acme Township's ordinance, Section 6.1.3, requires the exterior of any dwelling or accessory building to be completed with a suitable finishing material, including paint or stain on wood, within a year of the land use permit or a year of occupancy, whichever comes last, and not more than two years total. Basements have to be enclosed against water within two months of the start of construction. A bare steel building sitting unfinished through a Northern Michigan winter is a code problem, not a style choice.
If the parcel is raw, the septic question comes before any of this. We wrote about the perc test separately, and it's the one that decides whether there's a house in the picture at all.
Let me say plainly what I haven't done here. I read Green Lake, Grant, Acme and Long Lake for this. I have not read every township ordinance in Leelanau, Antrim and Benzie on the pole barn question, and they will not all match. Long Lake Township, for what it's worth, lists accessory buildings as a use by right in all nine of its zoning districts subject to plot plan review, which reads more permissive than Green Lake, and I'd still call the zoning administrator before I believed it for a specific parcel. Ask your township. They answer the phone.
If you're looking at land this fall around Traverse City or out toward Interlochen and you want somebody making those calls with you before you write an offer, that's a thing we do. You can also just scroll the current listings and daydream about the barn, which is most of what September is for.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com
