For almost 100 years, the corner of Wisconsin and P streets in Georgetown was home to the legendary Neam’s Market. It’s where diplomats bought their caviar and President Eisenhower special-ordered lettuce from Indiana. But the market closed nearly 20 years ago, and sometime this year, it’s due to become a Chase Bank.

Topher Mathews, who’s lived in Georgetown for 16 years, says that’s a massive disappointment.

“It’s just a huge waste of a really important historic asset,” Mathews says.

As of June 2018, FDIC data show there were 16 banks in the 20007 zip code, which includes Georgetown and Glover Park. According to Georgetown’s Business Improvement District, three more are expected to open this year. Two of them will be Chase locations.

“It seems to me to be too many,” Mathews says. “People aren’t in need of banking services in Georgetown. … This could be an open-air market. It could be a restaurant. It could be a whole lot of things that use this space more productively.”

Landlords tend to love banks because they pay high rents, and they fill vacancies left by other struggling retailers. But banks are increasingly concentrated in affluent neighborhoods, while other parts of the region are still underserved by financial institutions.

Mathews is echoing a sentiment often heard in the region’s wealthy neighborhoods, where banks tend to be the last thing residents want to see open down the street. Though thousands of branches have closed across the country in recent years, banks today dominate bustling corners in high-income areas—and they’re boring, to boot.

“They don’t contribute to the street life that other retail does,” says Mike Smith, director of real estate at Streetsense, a Bethesda-based strategy and design firm. “And if you have too many [banks] on a stretch of retail street … then you really end up with frontage that lacks activity for much of the day or much of the week.”

But landlords love banks, Smith says. They’re reliable tenants, and they’re willing to fork over higher rents than other businesses. Plus, they’re filling vacancies in shopping districts hit hard by online commerce, rising costs, and changing market conditions.

“Banks—being the high rent payers that they are, and seemingly having an appetite for continued expansion—have swept in, and are paying the rent that those landlords are looking for,” Smith says.

JPMorgan Chase plans to open dozens of new branches in the D.C. region in the years ahead. Capital One is investing heavily in its millennial-friendly café concept, with one already open in D.C.’s Chinatown and another coming to—yes—Georgetown.

The expansions are part of bank branches’ larger efforts to restrategize and remain visible as customers shift to online transactions and cheaper digital-only competitors. But that rebranding effort often goes hand in hand with saturating neighborhoods already teeming with banks—while largely sidestepping communities that could use a few more.

The Changing Face of Banking

The rebranding of banks is on full display at a new JPMorgan Chase branch in Washington’s busy McPherson Square.

Walk through the entrance on New York Avenue NW, and you’re greeted by a 165-inch Jumbotron blasting Chase advertisements, a row of ATMs and a collection of stylish, modern furniture. Customers lounge in what employees call a “living room,” and associates roam about freely in the open, not cloistered behind glass teller windows.

In fact, as manager Jonerik Wilson explains, Chase has largely phased out those old-fashioned windows. The two that are here are hidden behind moving walls that can be raised electronically.

“When not needed, it goes away. And you would never know,” Wilson says.

The point of this retooled bank, analysts say, is to ease more customers into online banking, sell services like Chase’s high-end “private client” program—and expose the Chase brand to as many Washingtonians as possible.

“I feel like this space has a big statement piece that kind of lets the community know we’re here,” Wilson says. “We have the digital screens that can be seen from the outside at night. This place is a beacon from any corner.”

Even today, bank branches remain a powerful advertising tool, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

An analysis done by McKinsey in 2017 says that “at one U.S. bank, we estimated the value of the physical network in just a single market to be equivalent to millions of dollars of annual marketing.”

That’s partly why banks don’t mind opening in neighborhoods that are already full of other banks. Their goal is to go exactly where their competition is and outshine them with swankier furniture, brighter signs—and sometimes even free grilled cheese sandwiches.

On April 12, the Capital One Café in Chinatown plans to hand out free sandwiches in honor of National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day.

“Like a lot of retail, banks are experimenting with what we call experiential retail,” says Mike Smith with Streetsense. “The ability to pull somebody in for a cup of coffee and potentially sell them on a financial service that they might not otherwise have engaged in? That’s a sale.”

*as of June 2018, according to FDIC data
**Based on 2013—2017 ACS 5-year estimates

But you won’t find banks handing out free grilled cheese in places like Capitol Heights, Maryland, where the median household income is $61,000, per Census data. In the 20743 area code, there is only one bank to serve more than 40,000 residents, according to the FDIC.

Contrast that to Bethesda, Maryland, where the median household income is about $121,000. In the 20814 zip code, there were 31 banks as of June 2018—equal to one bank for every 936 residents.

At a February gathering of investors, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon reportedly said the company’s “biggest opportunity” is wealthy clients. According to Bloomberg, the company has recently shuttered dozens of branches in lower-income neighborhoods across the U.S., while opening more in higher-income areas. Though in Baltimore and the Washington region, JPMorgan Chase has pledged to open at least 20 percent of its new branches in moderate- to low-income communities. One opened in Anacostia last year, with another on Minnesota Avenue NE.

But six years ago, a group of Georgetown residents unsuccessfully tried to block more banks from opening in their neighborhood. Topher Mathews was part of that effort. Today, the Georgetown resident says he’d love if some of his neighborhood’s banks packed up and moved to places that need them. That way, he says, more retail space could go to businesses he and his neighbors actually want.

“I hope some [banks] close,” Mathews says with a chuckle. “I hope some decide this is not really worth it and close, and something a lot more useful can open in its place.”

This story was originally published on WAMU.