Rural America Turning to Grocers, High-Fee ATMs as Banks Leave
- Small towns lost 1,533 bank branches in recent years
- Pete Buttigieg stops in Allendale to connect with black voters
Photographer: John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images
Fifty years ago Allendale, South Carolina, was a bustling community catering to New Yorkers driving to Florida. These days the tiny town makes the nightly news for drive-by shootings -- and caught the attention of federal regulators after it lost half of its bank branches.
The lack of financial institutions is a major challenge facing smaller towns, where more than 1,500 bank branches closed between 2012 and 2017, according to a recent Federal Reserve report. The loss of a simple credit union in Allendale speaks to deeper issues plaguing many rural communities, which are falling increasingly far behind cities even as America’s economy soars.
An hour south of Augusta, Georgia, Allendale seems lost in time. People here speak about its heyday, the 1960s, as if it were yesterday. Those once-thriving motels along U.S. Highway 301 are now hulks of broken glass, peeling paint and overgrown weeds. The arrival of Interstate 95 about 35 miles to the east began a decades-long slide for the town, as motorists could bypass the community.