SAGINAW TWP., MI — When the COVID-19 pandemic dried up patronage at Great Lakes Yoga in 2020, owner Jennifer Wilk watched with concern as her revenue stream disappeared.
Like so many owners did, Wilk could have pursued an exit strategy to cut loose the business and all its expenses.
“But I had to keep the studio open; I had to keep that resource open,” said Wilk, who bought the Saginaw Township-based establishment four years before the global health-turned-business crisis began.
Wilk’s patience and financial sacrifice paid off. The pandemic ended. Longtime clients returned. New customers walked through the door.
“Now we’ve got the highest attendance numbers our studio has ever seen, and we had to double our space so that we could increase our capacity,” she said. “It’s been wonderful. It shows our community is resilient.”
It’s a resilience Wilk said extends beyond the boundaries of her property, stretching down the State Street commercial district where Great Lakes Yoga resides and across town, where Bay and Tittabawassee road businesses are bustling with customers and growing in numbers.
The resurgence of Great Lakes Yoga represents a microcosm of the commercial comeback underway in Saginaw Township, local leaders said.
It’s a rebound with visuals. Motorists traveling down the township’s corridors in recent months, after all, may have noticed the new storefronts and expansion projects that have injected fresh capital and renewed faith in a business community that advocates consider central to the region’s economic health.
“People are finally discovering again that we are a great place to do business,” said Connie Reppuhn, whose multiple roles within the township provide her multiple perspectives of the resurgence in commerce.
Reppuhn serves as both a trustee for Saginaw Township’s seven-member governing body and as vice president for the community’s organized business association.
It’s perhaps her job as a real estate agent with Century 21 Signature Realty, though, that provides her the closest seat to the businesses investing — or re-investing — in Saginaw Township real estate.
From that seat, Reppuhn has watched fortunes turn around for businesses — like Great Lakes Yoga — that once seemed endangered and now add space to accommodate expanding customer bases. She has seen new enterprises occupy properties that previously housed businesses that did not survive economic crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2008 recession and the deflation of the region’s once-thriving automotive manufacturing industry.
“I know, from my commercial clients, they’re asking, ‘Can the location make money,’ and, ‘How saturated is this particular market,’” Reppuhn said. “One of the things I always say is, ‘You can buy anything once, but can you sell it?’ You need to make sure that, if you’re ever in a situation where you have to make a change immediately, you can sell it and break even or have a slight increase.”
Reppuhn said business representatives crunching those numbers in recent years have determined Saginaw Township was “a pretty good bet” for investment.
It’s an investment that includes many industries, but the trade perhaps most impactful to all her constituents is the restaurant sector. After all, everyone’s got to eat.
Benihana. Buffalo Wild Wings Go. Miles Market. Taco Bell. All have opened Saginaw Township stations since 2023. Others are planning to welcome customers in the coming months, including Chic-fil-A, Holly’s Bar & Grill, Pizza Hut, Popeyes Chicken Restaurant, and Wingstop.
Many of those businesses represent global chains that chose Saginaw Township based on deep analyses of population demographics that companies use to forecast the likelihood a community will generate sustained revenues.
Brian Rombalski, manager of Saginaw Township’s municipal operations, is familiar with the scouting process for big businesses seeking local franchises.
When those efforts advance far enough, Rombalski and his staff often provide those business scouts — sometimes referred to as “site selectors” — with the math that drives those investment decisions.
Rombalski said, based on the math he’s seen in recent years, it’s no surprise Saginaw Township has generated new interest. One of the demographics he said provides the most convincing data: Traffic numbers.
“We’re fortunate in Saginaw Township to have some of the most prominent intersections in all of Saginaw County, with Center and State and then Bay and Tittabawassee,” the township manager said.
“If I’m a site selector for Chic-fil-A, I’m going to see how those roads draw thousands of cars and workers and patrons there every single day.”
Population trends also likely contribute to many of those business investment decisions, Rombalski said.
Saginaw Township represents one of five municipalities in Saginaw County to gain residents between 2010 and 2020, U.S. Census data showed.
In 2020, 41,679 people lived Saginaw Township compared to 40,840 one decade earlier. That represented a 2.1% increase over that span.
Rombalski said the growth in some of the region’s largest employers in recent years also has proven an important factor in gaining the confidence of their peers in business.
He said, for example, Hemlock Semiconductor Corp.’s (HSC) $375 million expansion announcement in 2022 — and the 170 permanent jobs expected to accompany the Thomas Township-based expansion — boosted the prospects for commerce in Saginaw Township, which is expected to provide housing, food, and shopping options for many of those future HSC employees.
“It’s just very stable right now,” Peter Ryan, a member of the Saginaw Township Board of Trustees, said of his community’s business market. “We have good space available on good corners. There’s still prime real estate out there.”
That available real estate provides optimism for Ryan, Rombalski, Reppuhn and some of their peers that the surge in business investment announcements within Saginaw Township is not finished.
Some of the most attractive open spaces officials cited included the former site of Sears and Sears Auto Center in Fashion Square Mall as well as the former Bennigan’s restaurant, which both exited the busy corridor near the Bay and Tittabawassee intersection in fall 2019; and the former sites of Pizza Hut and Ponderosa Steakhouse, which both shut down further south in the same district.
Rombalski said one of the most significant business growths in recent years involved new owners moving into strip malls that, only a decade ago, appeared practically vacant.
“There are a lot of phenomenal opportunities out there for more growth,” said Bill Schutt, the director of community development for the township.
Schutt studies some of the same numbers site selectors use to forecast what’s ahead for commercial development and redevelopment.
He has kept tabs on specific industries that seemed especially prone to flourish. He, for example, likes to point out how the surge in chicken-based eateries in Saginaw Township aligns with national trends and studies factors that could explain why other industries seem especially interested in investment there lately, including financial institutions, car washes and storage unit companies.
“There’s reasons these trends happen,” Schutt said. “There’s reasons they’re happening here.”
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