Kochville Township, around the university

Kochville Township sits north of Saginaw Charter Township on the line with Bay County, its centre about 6.3 miles from the middle of the City of Saginaw in a straight line. The Census Gazetteer gives it 18.6 square miles of land. It is best known as the home of Saginaw Valley State University, which, according to summaries of the university's own history, opened in 1963 as Saginaw Valley College. The township itself is older. Encyclopedia summaries say it is named for Frederick Charles Koch, a German born settler who arrived in 1849, and was organised in 1856; a Castle Museum article, also seen through a summary, places the first township meeting at the home of Adam Goetz in Frankenlust and says the northern half went to Bay County in 1881.

A township that is growing

Kochville is one of the few places in the valley adding people. The April 2020 Census base counts 4,911 residents, the estimate dipped to 4,849 in 2021, and it has risen every year since, to 5,166 in July 2025, about 5.2 percent above the base. The 2020 to 2024 Census survey counts 1,397 homes with a median build year of 1988, among the newest in the county. Building has been spread over the decades: 212 homes from the 2010s, 277 from the 2000s and 185 from the 1990s, but also 185 from the 1960s and 127 from before 1940. In all 599, 42.9 percent, predate 1980, while 489, 35.0 percent, came in 2000 or later.

The mix of buildings is the unusual part. Single detached houses are fewer than half the stock, 676 or 48.4 percent. There are 250 homes in buildings of twenty to forty nine flats, 16 in larger ones, 315 in smaller buildings of two to nineteen homes and 140 mobile homes. Owners live in 698 of the 1,180 occupied homes, 59.2 percent, and 217 homes, 15.5 percent, were vacant when surveyed. The median owner occupied value is 156,800 dollars.

Two kinds of basement

A house from the 1990s or 2000s here usually has a poured wall, a plastic footing drain and a sump pit from the start. When those basements take water, the cause is most often a pump that has failed or run for years without a check, a discharge line that freezes or empties too close to the wall, or a shrinkage crack in the poured concrete. The farmhouses and early houses on the township's back roads are a different case: fieldstone or block cellars, often with no footing drain at all, where keeping the floor dry for storage is a realistic aim and a finished room is not. If you rent one of the many flats, a wet basement or ground floor is normally the owner's or the manager's job; report it to them in writing.

The Kochville Drain

This is flat, tiled farm country, and surface water leaves through county drains. Saginaw County drain assessment lists, read through search summaries, include the Kochville and Branches Drain, numbered K0020, with a 2024 assessment total of 25,002.17 dollars against 10,000 dollars on the 2023 list. The county explains that each drain district is its own public corporation paid for by special assessment, not general taxes. A road project on Davis Road, described by its engineers in another summary, laid new pipe beside the Kochville Drain in an easement between Pierce and Trautner roads. If your yard ponds for days after a storm, the drain serving your parcel may be the bottleneck, and Saginaw County Public Works, on 989-790-5258, can tell you which drain district you are in and take a flooding report.

Permits on Mackinaw Road

The township code, read through a search summary, names the Building Official of Kochville Township as the enforcing agency under the state construction code act of 1972, and zoning permits come from the Zoning Administrator. Directory listings, also summarised, put the township hall at 5851 Mackinaw Road, Saginaw, with a main line of (989) 792-7596; a 2021 county contact list gives weekday office hours split around a lunch break. Ring first and ask which permits a drain, pit or crack repair needs.

Nearby

Saginaw Charter Township, to the south, publishes a flat permit fee formula, and Tittabawassee Township, to the west around Freeland, has the newest houses in the valley.