Payday Loans With No Hassle

Microlending takes off in the Bay Area; small businesses reap the rewards

When Caitlin McShane looks down San Francisco's Mission Street, she doesn't see taco joints and bodegas bulging with ripe fruit. She sees sharks.

"Look over there -- payday loans,'' says the spokeswoman for San Jose-based Opportunity Fund, a Bay Area-based microlending nonprofit that helps small businesses get off the ground or expand. "And there's a check-cashing place on the corner. There's a pawnbroker, a loan office, and another payday loan place. People are getting into debt to loan sharks and even pawning their things to keep their businesses from going under. It's a mess, and this is what we're competing against.''

Sixteen years after making its first loan of $17,000 to San Jose's Treasure Chest Aquarium, Opportunity Fund has become the country's third-largest microlender and a star player in the burgeoning realm of microfinance, much of it clustered right here in the Bay Area. And while microloans are more often associated with helping goat farmers in Uganda than food trucks in Oakland, they've become an increasingly popular method of alternative financing for small businesses, many of them struggling beneath the crushing weight of the Great Recession.

"The growth rate of microfinance around the world is astounding, growing faster than worldwide Internet usage,'' says Sean Foote, a venture capitalist who teaches a course on the subject at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "Here in the U.S., it's a relatively new trend, but with 25 million 'unranked' people without access to credit, there's a huge market out there and the role of microlenders will continue to expand.''

Manuel Godino, a 47-year-old chef from Buenos Aires who came to the United States after Argentina's currency crisis in 2001, is a beneficiary of the trend. After running his nascent empanada business out of rented kitchens, Godino got a $45,000 loan at 7.5 percent interest from Opportunity Fund, opened a small restaurant this summer on Valencia Street in San Francisco, and has already hired eight full- and part-time employees.

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