Working with law professor Christopher Peterson of the University of Florida's College of Law, assistant professor of geography Steven Graves is nailing down nationwide locational patterns that suggest military families are increasingly the quarry of unscrupulous lenders.

Graves has determined that the density of payday lenders--which make high-cost loans to cash-strapped people--within three miles of U.S. military bases is higher than it is around other communities, a finding that already is having policy implications at both the state and federal levels.

"Christopher and I have already submitted testimony to the legislature in Virginia, giving our expert opinion on their payday lending laws, and the state of Georgia has completely outlawed payday lending," said Graves, who came to Northridge in 2003 as part of the campus' Teachers for a New Era education reform initiative.

The state of Washington has invited him to offer testimony for a Senate bill under preparation, and Graves said the U.S. Department of Defense also is interested in the pair's findings, to be published in spring or summer 2005.

"We've stumbled onto something at just the right time," said Graves, whose work in geographic information systems--computer mapping--attracted the attention of Peterson in fall of 2003.

The law professor had seen an earlier mapping study in which Graves had shown that payday lenders in Louisiana had a strong tendency to locate in poor and minority neighborhoods, and that banks were conspicuously absent from those communities.

While teaching a Louisiana Tech University course called "American Landscapes," Graves' students had suggested that storefront windows plastered with "Payday Lending" signs were "tell tale" signs of tough neighborhoods.

"That night," Graves recalled, "I was driving through one of those 'tough' neighborhoods. I noticed that on the south side of Line Avenue--the African-American side--there were eight payday lenders and no banks. On the north side--the white side--there were no payday lenders and eight banks. That's a pretty stark contrast."

Curious to learn if this was peculiar to Ruston, La., Graves began mapping in different areas, getting control data from Louisiana regulatory agencies and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The resulting study spurred the excited call from Peterson.

An expert on comparative lending laws who had researched predatory lending in the military dating back to ancient China, Peterson nevertheless knew nothing about computer mapping and thus had no mechanism for proving that patterns existed. "It made sense for us to work together," said Graves.

In his Louisiana study, Graves said, it had turned out that payday lenders were especially thick next to Louisiana military bases. "I was actually looking for casinos, thinking the lenders would be there, but they were packed in next to Barksdale Air Force Base."

The discovery had whetted Graves' appetite for further probing. For the new study, he began concentrating on California and 19 other states with large military installations.

He determined that the area around Camp Pendleton, for example, has a density of lenders that far exceeds the statewide and national averages: some 24 were packed in within three miles of the base. Within the next three-mile band, only eight lenders were mapped. A look at one lender's business plan revealed the thinking that "three miles is about as far as people will travel to get a loan."

Among the top ten largest military bases in the United States, Pendleton might well be expected to attract a high number of lenders. "But when you predict how many payday lenders there should be, given the total population, Pendleton still exceeds expectation."

Graves and Peterson's work is helping to locate the problem and measure its scope. By providing valuable data, it ultimately will help the military figure ways to ease the web of debt that lenders spin around overextended troops trapped into "getting loans to pay off loans" at lending operations all over town.