Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
experienced a general round of housing
discrimination. The continuing decay of the inner
city was strongly driven by the unwillingness of
financial institutions to invest in these areas.
Restrictive practices in the housing market have
ameliorated with civil rights and race relations
legislation and with the re-regulation of the
financial system, which led to mortgage
availability under the 'right to buy' policy. This
flexibility ended in the 1990s with the retreat of
the financial system to its traditional middle-class
heart land (Leyshon and Thrift 1997) and the
redirection of credit away from poorer and
towards richer social groups as a strategy of risk
avoidance.
Financial exclusion has ramifications well
outside the particular case of the housing market.
Bank accounts, cheque cards, credit cards, non-
cash transactions and short-term loans have
become essential parts of society. Without access
to at least some of these facilities, people are placed
at significant disadvantage. In Britain, credit
transfers or crossed cheques are used to pay, for
example, benefits and pensions but about 35 per
cent of this group do not have a bank account.
Credit cards, store cards and hire purchase are not
available to low-income groups, yet these are
increasingly common as modes of transaction.
There is evidence for more aggressive banking
practice involving, for example, the re-
introduction of charges for those with low
balances, the closing of accounts with low balances
and few transactions, and branch bank closures in
areas where the volume of business is judged to be
unsatisfactory. Christopherson (1993) argued that
there was a relationship between an underlying
geography of income and class and the pattern of
financial service branch closure. The evidence
from the United States is of withdrawal of
financial services from poorer communities,
principally the African-American and Hispanic
inner city areas. Davis (1990) referred to this as
contributing to the 'spatial apartheid' of the
American urban system (Box 30.2). No study of
