Predatory Lending to Be Focus of Ferritor Lecture

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Gregory Squires, delivering Ferritor Lecture

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Gregory Squires, professor of sociology and public policy and public administration at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., will speak on “Too Big to Bail and Too Big to Jail: Predatory Lending from the Bible to the Bible Belt and Beyond” on Wednesday, April 21, at 6 p.m. in Room E107 of the Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences Building. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Currently he is a member of the board of directors of the Woodstock Institute, the advisory board of the John Marshall Law School Fair Housing Legal Support Center in Chicago, Ill., and the social science advisory board of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C. He has served as a consultant for civil rights organizations around the country and as a member of the Federal Reserve Board’s Consumer Advisory Council.

Squires is the author of numerous publications, including Housing Policy Debate, Urban Studies, Social Science Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, New York Times and Washington Post. He has written a number of books, including Insurance Redlining; Color and Money; Urban Sprawl; Organizing Access to Capital; Why the Poor Pay More: How to Stop Predatory Lending; Privileged Places: Race, Residence and the Structure of Opportunity; There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina; and The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities.

In his research, Squire has focused on the racial implications of metropolitan development and the role of financial services as they produce the uneven development of metropolitan areas. He has collaborated with many nonprofit organizations and government agencies in a variety of initiatives to encourage more equitable and sustainable development of cities, suburbs and the metropolitan regions of which they are a part. He has conducted community-based research, served as an expert in fair housing and related civil rights lawsuits and consulted for government agencies and nonprofit fair-housing and civil rights organizations. He recently provided testimony before the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Hearing and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development concerning the role of segregation and the subprime lending crisis in America.

The Ferritor Lecture is sponsored by the Bernice Jones Chair in Community and named for former Daniel Ferritor, a former University of Arkansas chancellor and professor of sociology in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.