  A lack of financial access, which is often an issue in many central-city U.S.
neighborhoods, can be linked to higher interest rates as well as negative
health and psychological outcomes. A number of analyses of "banking deserts"
have also found these areas to be poorer and less White than other parts of the
city. While previous research has examined specific cities, or has classified
areas by population densities, no study to date has examined a large set of
individual cities. This study looks at 319 U.S. cities with populations greater
than 100,000 and isolates areas with fewer than 0.318 banks per square mile
based on distances from block-group centroids. The relative shares of these
"deserts" appears to be independent of city population across the sample, and
there is little relationship between these shares and socioeconomic variables
such as the poverty rate or the percentage of Black residents. One plausible
explanation is that only a subset of many cities' poorest, least White block
groups can be classified as banking deserts; nearby block groups with similar
socioeconomic characteristics are therefore non-deserts. Outside of the
Northeast, non-desert areas tend to be poorer than deserts, suggesting that
income- and bank-poor neighborhoods might not be as prevalent as is commonly
assumed.
