SAGINAW, MI — Evelyn Moten learned real estate under the wings of Thelma Poston and remains active into her senior years, offering insights into the city’s lack of affordable housing and the resulting losses of population and tax base.
To the table, Moten brings knowledge of the blatant mortgage redlining that Poston fought against six decades ago. Soon after she started in 1986, she recalls the over-shift to easy home loans that often exploited first-time buyers.
Poston’s era: No loans. Moten’s time: Bad loans.
Is it even possible to reverse the tide that has reduced Saginaw’s baby boom peak of 100,000 population to today’s 42,000, with the result leading to thousands of vacant lots and substandard houses, the worst among them abandoned?
Moten doesn’t speak in the expected terms like targeted financing or reasonable code enforcement or keeping property taxes in line. Instead, her focus is on respect and appreciation for the examples of quality housing that remain, even in the most hard-pressed neighborhoods.
“We need to educate people before they buy, when they see the blight and then to also see the light,” she says. “Have an eye for quality.”
This reflects the influence of Thelma Poston, whose husband Carl, who was a law partner with Henry Marsh and who during the late 1960s joined Saginaw’s first Black mayor on the City Council.
Thelma became a ground-breaking local minority-race Realtor because she perceived that her family had been victims of redlining, named for lines drawn on maps to indicate neighborhoods where Black homebuyers were not allowed.
One day during the 1980s, Mrs. Poston knocked on the door of a rental near Fourth and Walnut where Evelyn and Buddy Moten, an autoworker, were starting their family of five children. Thelma indicated she was selling a house across the street, and the Motens jumped at the chance to become homeowners. Buddy, her hubby today of 57 years and counting, took such pride that neighborhood teens with grass-cutting jobs dreamed of lawns “just like Mr. Moten’s.”
Evelyn always was on the lookout for a second income, taking management and accounting classes at Delta College, at SVSU and at the former downtown Saginaw Business Institute. When she experienced how Thelma Poston made such a difference in her family’s future, she decided real estate would be her calling as well. In addition to maintaining her own office, she has served housing-aid efforts that range from Saginaw’s Habitat for Humanity to Flint’s Mission of Peace, all while remaining active in leadership at Victorious Believers Ministries.
The health of the city’s overall development can make a difference in people’s housing choices, she says, citing the example of projects along South Washington, with a CMU College of Education in the offing for a new Medical Diamond on the riverfront. The key, she says, is to create momentum, a groundswell of change that makes moving into the city — or staying — a popular trend,
Still, she sees an uphill battle.
“It’s almost like we need some sort of think tank,” Moten says. “Something to show that we parents care about the families and the kids in our community.”
