These huge national banks are almost certainly devastating for communities the same way a Walmart of a dollar store is.

It’s one of the major drivers for the worsening US urban development patterns. Community-based financial organizations that can meet complex needs of a developed community just can’t compete with these huge national banks. It drives standardized, product-based development – which means suburban sprawl, industrial parks, and strip-malls – instead of complex mixed-used development and infill.

The community banks were capable of that kind of thoughtful, complex product design to work with local developers, but they just can’t out-compete the national ones. And so instead of keeping money in the community and fueling healthy development, we instead have it extracted from the community to fuel the kind of development that is a net negative to the city’s finances. The drain is so severe that most community-based banks simply… don’t exist anymore. Or at least aren’t much more than a franchise for some bigger banking entity.