Dean Lovelace first focused on all the payday lending shops sprouting up around Dayton. It was the second half of the 1990s and to Lovelace, who had served on the Dayton City Commission since 1993, it felt like his hometown was under attack. It was no wonder. By 1999, Allan Jones and Billy Webster had each opened seven stores in the greater Dayton area and Toby McKenzie had opened six. Jared and David Davis, the brother tandem behind Check ’n Go, had added another four. It was as if the demographics from this one unprepossessing blue-collar city in the heartland had been poured into a database and bells started clanging and lights started flashing JACKPOT! on computer screens in the corporate development offices of payday chains across the country. Closer to home, there was Lee Schear, a local entrepreneur whom Lovelace was inclined to describe as a “profiteer.” For years Schear had been making plenty off the working poor, cashing checks (for a fee) and selling lottery tickets at the small chain of grungy grocery stores he ran in Dayton’s poorer precincts. But with the legalization of payday, he was now operating two dozen of these storefronts in and around town. By the end of the 1990s, Dayton, a city of 150,000, and the surrounding suburbs were home to more than fifty payday shops.
Lovelace had grown up in Dayton, born to a single mother who raised three children largely on her own. It was only after his mother died during his senior year in high school that he learned that she never earned more than $200 a week. Looking through her papers he finally realized why they had moved every year he was in high school; his mother had fallen behind on the rent and each time they had been evicted. Lovelace would go on to earn an undergraduate degree in business from the University of Dayton and a master’s in social economics at Wright State University. He then worked as a planner inside city hall until taking a job as the director of neighborhood development at the University of Dayton, a post he would hold for more than twenty-five years. He won a seat on the Dayton City Commission (its equivalent of the city council), a part-time position, on his third try. He lives in a nice-size, handsome house in a modest middle-class community in Dayton but there could be no dismissing Lovelace as a silver-spooned elitist who has never been desperate for quick cash. He knew what it meant to be broke.
The payday lenders started showing up in 1996 shortly after the Ohio legislature, after intense lobbying from the industry, voted to exempt small, short-term loans from the state’s 28 percent usury cap, thereby legalizing payday lending. As a commissioner, Lovelace had championed a living wage ordinance (but had to compromise on an $8.80 an hour minimum wage that applied only to those doing business with the city) and to him shutting down the payday lenders was the flip side of the same coin: Making sure people earned a better wage would mean little, he reasoned, if they only spent that extra money borrowing money at usurious rates from these new shops. The issue really hit home when his niece phoned him one day. “They got me,” she told him. She barely made minimum wage but after frittering away hundreds of dollars in fees that she couldn’t afford, she was now in a deeper mess. “They’re calling me at work,” she told Lovelace. She was scared she might lose her job.
Lovelace didn’t know what a city commissioner could do about a statewide law that had only just passed a few years earlier, but he felt compelled to do something. Using his limited clout, he held a series of community meetings around the city. “I just figured at that point I needed to raise awareness,” Lovelace said. “I at least wanted to start a dialogue.” He wanted to alert people to what he saw as a growing menace to the city’s economic health.
Only around thirty people showed up at that first meeting. A couple of consumer advocates were enlisted to explain why high-interest, short-term loans were very seldom an effective answer to a customer’s cash flow crisis and a local legal aid lawyer told the group about the hundreds of payday-related default judgments clogging the local courts. A few payday customers stood to voice their displeasure over these new neighbors taking over empty storefronts in strip malls throughout town. You borrow to “bridge a gap,” a woman named Pam Shackelford explained, “except there’s no way you’re gonna bridge a gap if the gap keeps getting bigger.” But then a woman named Suriffa Rice, a home health-care worker, took her turn at the microphone. “I can’t go to my mama,” Rice said. “I can’t go to a bank. I can’t go to my church. Where am I supposed to go if I don’t have payday [loans] anymore?”
Dean Lovelace is a short and stocky black man with a mustache and silver-framed glasses that always seem to be sitting slightly askew on his face. When his turn to speak came, he had to confess to Rice that he didn’t have much of an answer for her. A couple of credit unions around the state were experimenting with what they were calling “stretch pay loans” but that was about it. An economist by training, Lovelace recognized that the real issue was better financial education and other reforms. Whether or not the payday lenders were greedy would be a moot point if banks actually offered products aimed at the working poor. In the end, his meetings generated a few articles but added up to little more than some high-profile hand-wringing.
Lovelace was hardly done, though. He has a mild-mannered and pleasant disposition yet by nature he is a battler and a crusader and not one who goes along just to get along. Early in his career, C. J. McLin, Jr., the godfather of black politics in Dayton, took him under his wing but Lovelace proved incapable of serving the gofer role he was expected to play. He ran the Dayton chapter of the Rainbow Coalition for Jesse Jackson’s two presidential bids in the 1980s and led the local fight against police brutality. He had also spearheaded a coalition formed to pressure the city’s big banks over their lack of lending in Dayton’s low-and moderate-income communities. In fact, at around the same time he was organizing his hearings into payday lending, a local activist named Jim McCarthy, the executive director of the area’s Fair Housing Center, invited him to join a committee they were putting together to figure out what was happening on the home ownership front. Businesses were starting to lend in the city’s lower-income communities but it wasn’t turning out to be a good thing.
Ever since its frontier days, Dayton had always been a place that devoted itself to making things: steam pumps and water wheels in its earliest history, stoves and solvents, tool-and-die machines, cardboard boxes, and a goodly portion of the country’s cash registers well into the twentieth century. “The city of a thousand factories”—that’s what Dayton, once home to 260,000 people, dubbed itself.
But then a sizable portion of those thousand factories shuttered their doors, moving south or overseas, in search of lower taxes and weaker unions, or simply going out of business. The city lost more than one-fifth of its people through the 1970s and more kept leaving. By the time
Jim McCarthy can remember pretty much the exact moment when he realized Dayton was being aggressively targeted by a new kind of business. It was 1999, he was thirty-three or thirty-four years old, and, as the newly installed head of Fair Housing, he was a member of an advisory board the county had created to oversee an affordable housing fund. Fair Housing routinely heard from people claiming they had been denied a loan because of their race, but in recent weeks several people, all of them African-American, had contacted his organization making something like the opposite assertion: They were about to lose their home because of a refinancing. When he mentioned this during a meeting of the advisory board, someone offered that he too was noticing something strange. Over the years the federal government had set aside billions of dollars to make low- and no-interest home loans available to people living in areas that had designated community development zones, yet now people were coming to his office with large checks in hand to pay off these loans. “These are the kinds of loans you basically don’t pay off until you die,” McCarthy said. “It made us all ask the question, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
The advisory board decided to form a group to look into the matter. Dean Lovelace joined them and so did Beth Deutscher at Consumer Credit Counseling Services. Like Lovelace, Deutscher didn’t need any convincing. She oversaw a Consumer Credit project created to help first-time homebuyers but in recent months she seemed to be spending as much time aiding existing homeowners who had fallen into trouble. Where her organization had typically heard from maybe one or two people a week seeking mortgage default counseling, the call volume had jumped to four or five per day. She grew more alarmed, she said, once the agency’s counselors started meeting with people. “These were loans designed to bring maximum profit to the lender and minimum benefit to the borrower,” Deutscher said. Rounding out the group were executives with KeyBank and Fifth Third, two of the bigger
