You’ve purchased a home/property in a rural area of Orion Township zoned for single family homes. You love the feeling of being in the country, close to the expressway and shopping. Welcome to Orion Township, Where Living is a Vacation, right?
Then a landowner with a few acres close by requests to rezone their property to multi-family residential (to potentially build 132 apartments or townhomes). This property is on a rural road, butts up to a privately-owned gravel road which the homeowners pay to maintain. How can this happen?
Multi-family residential units must have direct access onto an existing or proposed major thoroughfare road, according to the township’s ordinance section for RM1 and RM2 zones.
If you’re not familiar with the township’s future land maps, you should be (they are updated every five years). This can affect your home/property value immensely. The township will not notify you directly; they will give you public notice in The Lake Orion Review newspaper. That’s all they are required to do by law. So, if you miss it, there’s no recourse.
Recently on Feb. 21, there was a public hearing about the request for rezoning these acres and thankfully the zoning board denied it. Partially because of their own ordinance, and because over 200 residents signed a petition to deny it, and we had a large turnout of residents at the hearing.
So, when residents requested the zoning board to make an amendment to the future land map they refused. This future land map won’t get redone until 2027 and could potentially deter future homebuyers as well as reduce the resale value.
In my opinion this is not right. Amendments should be allowed when the township rezones property that should never have been rezoned in the first place, from their own ordinances and bylaws!

Monica Voytek
Orion Twp.