“I will never forget going to Gallup on my way to the Navajo reservation and seeing just store after store after store of predatory lenders lined up tip to tail all the way to the border with Arizona,” said Whitney Barkley-Denney, a deputy director of state policy and a senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending.
“I think they locate in those areas ... for all sorts of reasons, including historical and system racism,” she said. “People have less wealth, right? They have less money to fall back on, and they’re more likely to be lower paid, and so they go there because those are exactly the people who they think will be desperate enough to use their product.”
