Over 16 of the nearly 20 years Detroit-based childcare provider Debra Ann Ezell has been open, she’s tried to expand her small business to take in more kids, to no avail.
Why? Zoning, she says.
Even as she meets state-mandated safety and health regulations for her site, Ezell has tried multiple times to get the city’s permission to expand, but says she was consistently discouraged from doing so because of costly and confusing zoning regulations.
In a city with a nearly 30,000 childcare seat gap and in a neighborhood like southwest, which has a noticeable lack of licensed care options for families, Ezell wonders how it could be so hard for her to expand to serve more families.
“It would be different if I was around liquor stores but I’m a block from a neighborhood park… I’m in a school district and kids need child care and I’m the only licensed childcare in the 48217 zipcode,” said Ezell, whose childcare site is rated at the state’s highest level.
Ezell’s case is not unique, and neither is Detroit. In cities, towns, villages, and municipalities across the state, experts say zoning regulations, intended to protect the wellbeing of residents, can end up burdening childcare providers looking to open or expand.
For these uniquely strapped small businesses, already beholden to a whole host of state requirements, local zoning regulations might stick them with thousands of additional dollars spent on application fees or new adjustments not required by the state and time spent on scheduling and attending government hearings to get approval.
“These are small businesses that have a lot of headwinds against them,” said Phil Santer, chief operating officer at Ann Arbor Spark, a business support organization in Washtenaw County. “Lets not add another layer on top that’s questionable in terms of where it’ll add safety or any other value.”
Planning experts say that zoning regulations have not caught up with the increasing need that local communities are seeing for childcare. But that’s changing as cities across the nation and the state, including Detroit and Ann Arbor, look to find ways they can create a larger stock of childcare seats for families and find zoning among the levers they can pull.
16 years, no success
Precious Steps Child Care, which Ezell runs out of her home in southwest Detroit, sits on a quiet street lined with other single-family houses. Her deck is hung with patriotic decorations and a large vertical welcome sign stands next to her door.
She currently is allowed to care for seven kids but as a provider in a residentially zoned location, she’s able to expand her home-based childcare up to 14. But the process to do so has historically been challenging for providers like herself in Detroit.
The first time she tried expanding around 2010, Ezell said her understanding was that she’d have to pay over $2,000 in application fees and to comply with other city requirements, which didn’t guarantee her the zoning permit – she’d still have to go in front of a city department for a hearing after which they’d accept or deny her request.
“If I’m going to pay that kind of money, it needs to be guaranteed,” said Ezell.
Ezell says she tried again around 2016. This time, in hopes she wouldn’t have to go into debt to expand, she collected letters from her neighbors vouching for her childcare’s importance to the area. She’d been told by staff at her local district office she could try to use the letters to make a case to Detroit City Council. But after a couple tries, left waiting from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center downtown, she said she never got called and gave up.
“I don’t have that kind of time,” Ezell said.
Around 2023, Ezell says she tried a third time, paying an $80 online deposit, after which she learned there’d be multiple steps to expanding, like getting an architect to come out to her site to take measurements, among other things she can’t recall, though she remembers feeling they were absurd. She dropped her effort again.
Zoning regulations like the ones Ezell says she bumped up against are generally in place to ensure a property is compliant with certain safety and health codes at the city level (like whether the site has enough outdoor space for kids and proper fencing to keep kids away from neighbors), said Marcell Todd, director at the Detroit City Planning Commission.
Detroit makes a change
Ezell’s experience is not unique, said Lisa Sturges, who worked at former Mayor Mike Duggan’s Office of Early Learning, which spearheaded the push for amending childcare zoning code in 2022.
“For as long as I have been in the field, I would hear from providers all time that they wanted to expand and zoning was getting in the way,” Sturges said.
As was the case in Ezell’s situation, the vast majority of childcare providers are uniquely squeezed small businesses, operating on razor-thin margins, without the resources to pay hefty fees or time to take off work for hearings.
Heavily regulating small businesses as they look to expand or open a larger site is common in city zoning, said Kirk Scharphorn, partner at Professional Code Inspections, a company that carries out community planning and zoning for nearly 70 municipalities across western Michigan.
That’s because municipalities want to prevent businesses from becoming too large without oversight, especially in residential areas, where home-based childcare providers are typically located.
To address zoning barriers for Detroit’s childcare providers, the Office of Early Learning pushed forward city zoning code amendments. Two years later, the amendments were adopted in part by Detroit’s City Council in 2024. Family childcares like Ezell’s would now be allowed to expand without extra hoops if they’d been operating for at least a year in basically all residential areas throughout Detroit.
The childcare zoning amendments also increased the areas where childcares could open, most significantly for larger centers, some of which would now be permitted in larger swaths of the city, according to data analysis from Data Driven Detroit.
As for Ezell, even though the 2024 zoning amendments opened the gates for her to finally expand, she wasn’t aware the change had occurred and still hasn’t expanded, a fact which illuminates another issue: many childcare providers still might not know that zoning has gotten easier, said Buildings, Safety, Engineering and Environmental Department Director David Bell.
There was no mass notification sent to Detroit childcare providers alerting them of the zoning changes, explaining what they were or what to do now — many providers had already been involved in public hearings and surveys, said Rory Bolger, planner at the Detroit City Planning Commission.
But beyond learning about the changes, these moms and pops shops need broader support to act on the zoning changes.
“I think we could do more…it’s easier to expand now, here are the steps to do it,” said Furquan Khaldun, who works at Hope Starts Here, one of the community organizations helping spread the word about zoning changes to providers. “Do you need a business loan, architectural support? It’s about making sure we have all these supports available.”
Beki San Martin is a fellow at the Detroit Free Press who covers childcare, early childhood education and other issues that affect the lives of children ages 5 and under and their families in metro Detroit and across Michigan. Contact her at rsanmartin@freepress.com.
This fellowship is supported by the Bainum Family Foundation. The Free Press retains editorial control of this work.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: One woman’s 16-year journey illuminates childcare dilemma
Reporting by Beki San Martin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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