Putting a cap on payday lenders

OREM — Orem city officials have put a cap on the number of payday lending stores they will accept in their city, hoping to limit the opportunities for residents to become buried under loans with annual percentage rates as high as 800 percent.

The Orem City Council has adopted an ordinance, similar to other cities in Utah, that limits the number of deferred-deposit loan stores to one store for every 10,000 residents.

Leaders in Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County are considering similar ordinances.

Critics of payday lenders applaud such moves, but industry representatives said they will only hurt consumer choice.

Orem has 23 such stores for approximately 90,000 residents — Check City, Check Into Cash, Quick Loan, to name a few — far more than the nine it should have under the new ordinance.

"They're doing good business," said Myla Dutton, executive director of the Community Action Services and Food Bank, an organization dedicated to helping low-income residents. "That's why they're here. They're not hurting for business."

Stores now in Orem can remain open under the "grandfather" clause, but should one close, another cannot open until the number of stores drops below nine.

Payday or deferred-deposit loans allow people without good credit to get quick loans from $10 to $1,000 for as little as $20.

The expensive money loan is due in a week or after the person's next paycheck — with interest.

If the person can't pay, they often roll over the loan, gathering more interest and promising to pay the next week, Dutton said. However, with APR, or annual percentage rates, at well over 500 percent, the interest quickly can become more than the initial loan.

The first payday loan business popped into Utah in the mid-1980s, and now there are more than 400, said Linda Hilton, director of the Coalition of Religious Communities in Salt Lake City. Hilton has been working to educate people on payday lending since 1999.

"It's been around for a long time," she said. "In the Depression it was called loan sharking, and Al Capone ran it. It's (now) legalized loan sharking. The growth of this industry is growing faster than Starbucks."

Dutton said some of her surveys of low-income families in Utah, Wasatch and Summit counties showed that 12 percent to 15 percent of those they served have used payday lending and "most of the time they do not understand the costs," she said.

The true cost of credit over a one-year period is called the annual percentage rate, which includes the account fees and interest. So when someone pays $225 for a $200 loan in a week or two, the APR gets enormous.