The Unbanking Of America: How the New Middle Class Survives. This item is unavailable.The Unbanking Of America: How the New Middle Class Survives

All three are victims of our dysfunctional mainstream bank and credit system. Today nearly half of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck, as income volatility has doubled over the past thirty years. Banks, with their monthly fees and high overdraft charges, take advantage of these fluctuations rather than help their lower and middle income customers manage them. Lisa Servon delivers provocative dispatches from inside a range of banking alternatives serving a steadily increasing number of Americans. She works as a tellerat RiteCheck, a check-cashing business in the South Bronx; as a payday lender in Oakland, California; and looks closely at the workings of a tanda, an informal lending club. And she delivers fascinating, hopeful portraits of the entrepreneurs reacting to the unbanking of America -and designing systems to transform how nonwealthy Americans can gain the access to and agency over their own money that they, especially, need.

LISA SERVON is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania and a former dean of the New School. Her work on consumer financial services has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic online, and The New Yorker online, among many others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.