Wakeshma Township

No Wakeshma Township zoning district lists a whole-house short-term rental as a permitted use, and the township has not adopted a short-term rental ordinance that would create one.^[1] Zoning Ordinance No. 41 divides the entire township into just three districts: A-Agriculture, which covers nearly all of the township’s farmland and woodlots; R-1 Single Family Residential, which covers most of the unincorporated community of Fulton; and the MU Multi-Use Overlay, a small overlay in Fulton that adds commercial and multi-family uses on top of the R-1 base.^[1]

Wakeshma uses what planners call permissive zoning: a use is allowed only if the ordinance specifically names it. Renting a home to short-stay guests is not named as a permitted or special use in any of the three districts, which is why an STR here sits in a genuine legal gray area rather than being clearly allowed or clearly banned.^[1] The single short-stay use the ordinance does define is a Bed and Breakfast Inn, allowed as a special land use in the A-Agriculture and R-1 districts (see the next two sections).^[1]

The township’s official zoning map is kept in paper form by the Township Clerk and is not published online. To confirm which district a specific parcel falls in, contact the Clerk’s office directly before relying on any assumption about a property.^[1]

There is no short-term rental registration or STR permit to apply for in Wakeshma Township, because the township has not adopted a short-term rental ordinance.^[1] That does not mean an STR carries no municipal obligations.

Section 3.3 of the zoning ordinance requires a zoning compliance permit before any building or land is occupied or put to a new use, and converting a dwelling to a guest-lodging operation is the kind of use change that triggers it.^[1] The zoning compliance permit is issued by the Township Zoning Administrator, and application fees are set by Township Board motion under Section 18.7 rather than posted online, so confirm the current fee with the township office.^[1] Operating as a Bed and Breakfast Inn additionally requires a special land use permit approved by the Planning Commission after a public hearing, covered in the next section.^[1]

If you renovate to prepare a property for rental use, building, electrical, mechanical, and plumbing permits are handled by SCMCCI, the regional inspection agency that serves Wakeshma Township, not by the township itself.^[4][5]

A Bed and Breakfast Inn is the only short-stay lodging use the Wakeshma zoning ordinance defines, and it limits each guest stay to no more than seven consecutive days.^[1] The ordinance describes a B&B Inn as a use subordinate to a single-family dwelling in which transient guests are provided a sleeping room and board for compensation, which in practice means an owner-occupied house renting out rooms rather than a stand-alone whole-house rental.^[1]

A B&B Inn is a special land use in both the A-Agriculture and R-1 Single Family Residential districts.^[1] Securing one means going through the special land use procedure: a written application, a noticed public hearing before the Planning Commission, and a decision measured against the ordinance’s special land use standards.^[1][12] Plan on weeks, not days, and budget for the application fee set by the Township Board.

A fully unhosted, whole-house short-term rental does not fit the B&B Inn definition, since it is neither subordinate to an occupied dwelling nor room-and-board lodging. An operator pursuing that model would need a formal zoning interpretation or a variance from the Zoning Board of Appeals before proceeding.^[1]

Because Wakeshma Township has no public water or sewer, the practical ceiling on how many guests a rural rental can host is the capacity of its onsite septic system, not a local occupancy ordinance.^[6] Zoning Ordinance No. 41 sets no guest-occupancy cap and no quiet-hours rule, so the binding constraints come from the property’s own infrastructure and from county and state rules.^[1]

Every septic system in the township is permitted by the Kalamazoo County Health Department and sized to a specific design flow based on the number of bedrooms; routinely exceeding that flow with large short-stay groups risks system failure and an expensive replacement.^[6] When a rural property changes hands, county well and septic evaluations are commonly required to document that both systems are sound, and a rental buyer should treat that evaluation as essential due diligence.^[7]

Parcel boundaries, utility lines, and tax details for any specific property can be checked in the Kalamazoo County parcel viewer.^[8]