Landscapes of Predation, Landscapes of Neglect: A Location Analysis of Payday Lenders and Banks

By Steven M. Graves. Professional Geographer, 2003

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Since the period of bank deregulation in the 1980s, deferred deposit loan operations, better known as payday lenders, have become commonplace in the landscapes of many American cities. At the same time, traditional banking facilities have become less common, especially in the inner city. Growing disparities in the type of and accessibility to credit in the inner city has generated calls for greater regulation to curb practices by payday lenders that critics claim disproportionately affect poor and minority consumers. Payday lenders argue that they serve communities neglected by traditional banks. This article analyzes the site-location strategies of banks and payday lenders in metropolitan Louisiana, and in Cook County, Illinois, and finds that disenfranchised neighborhoods are simultaneously targeted by payday lenders and neglected by traditional banks. The implications these findings have for public policy and for ongoing discourses on the urban condition, race, and class are briefly discussed. *The author would like to thank several anonymous reviewers, the Illinois Department of Financial Institutions, and the Louisiana Office of Financial Institutions for their assistance with this project.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27da0b29abc5c4a0eb04835f9aad86f11ea9a099

Citations in the corpus

• Damages Done: The Longitudinal Impacts of Natural Hazards on Wealth Inequality in the United States (2018, unknown): “…inequality in liability interest rates continues daily in many marginalized communities, where formal banks are absent and payday loan establishments thrive by charging less-affluent borrowers considerably higher rates than those available to other Americans in more privileged areas (Graves 2003).”
• Classification situations: Life-chances in the neoliberal era (2013, unknown): “…still being felt in the form of reversed patterns of geographical location of bank branches and ‘‘pred-atory’’ lenders in white and black neighborhoods (Graves, 2003), in African-Americans’ weaker personal ties to main-stream financial institutions, and in the persistence of more insidious, but…”