BOOK REVIEW: The Explosive Account of the Arson Wave that Hit the Bronx and Other American Cities in the 1970s—and its Legacy Today
Written by Margaret Groarke
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield. Norton, 2025.
The wave of arson that destroyed 20% of Bronx housing stock in the 1970s shaped New York City, and shaped my worldview. I grew up in the north Bronx, at a time when the fires were moving ever closer to my neighborhood (there were two fires on my block in the early 80s). I worked for, and remain active in the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a community organization with its early roots in combatting the arson. I study grassroots politics as a political scientist. For me, Bench Ansfield’s book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, revisits a familiar story, but thoroughly documents the way that government policy, insurance company profit motives, and landlord profit motives intertwined to light the fires.
Although the Bronx was not the only urban community plagued by fires in the 1970s, it is the most famous one, and continues to be closely connected in the public imagination with the fires. Many explanations have been offered for the arson wave that plagued the Bronx. Ansfield quotes various prominent people who blamed the fires on Bronx residents themselves – families hoping to get priority for public housing, or thrill-seeking teenagers. But it was believed by Bronxites then, and has long been known by chroniclers of the time, that one significant cause of the fires was landlords seeking an insurance buyout. Born in Flames argues that the development of special insurance programs for “riot-prone” neighborhoods created a perverse incentive for landlords to torch their properties.
Historian Daniel Immerwahr, reviewing the book in The New Yorker, challenges Bench Ansfield’s assertion that most of the arson was landlord-set or landlord-ordered, citing contemporaneous observers who estimate that 20-40 percent were landlord-initiated. But a variety of factors make it difficult to know for certain how many fires were intentionally set. New York City closed down firehouses, cut the number of fire marshals and cut fire inspections by 70%. Insurance companies, for reasons Ansfield details, paid out claims without much investigation. The evidence to resolve this dispute was likely never collected.
Ansfield offers some persuasive evidence that landlord arson was a significant factor in the burning of the Bronx. Public housing was largely immune to the fires, because no profit would be made off it. Fire starters confessed, and wore wire-taps, to reveal the roles of individual landlords, and elaborate multi-landlord arson rings. I would argue that Ansfield’s contribution is not that they quantified the percentage of fires set, or paid for, by property owners, it is that they added to our understanding of the way that insurance policies incentivized landlords to burn properties that were worth less than they were insured for. Ansfield delves deep into the financial roots of the crisis, explaining the connection between government policy, insurance companies, and landlords.
Ansfield begins the story with the federal government response to the riots of the 1960s. Black and Brown communities, Ansfield explains, had been redlined as “riot-prone areas,” and therefore it became more and more difficult for homeowners and owners of businesses and multi-family apartment buildings to purchase insurance. The Hughes Commission proposed, and Congress swiftly legislated, the creation of Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plans in every state, requiring insurance companies to write policies in these neighborhoods and pool their risk.
Ideally, insurance would incentivize the policyholder to take good care of the insured property, in exchange for lower premiums and coverage of losses. Think of contemporary auto insurance, which offers lower premiums for safe driving habits. But Ansfield points out that the design of the FAIR plans didn’t follow these basic insurance principles. The NY Property Insurance Underwriters Association (NYPIUA), which was NY’s FAIR plan, did not routinely notify property owners of safety violations, or require property owners to use insurance proceeds to repair the damage (for example, from a fire). Hence the insurance protected property owners’ financial stake, but not the property or the residents. Greater attention in this book to the homeowners who continued to suffer lack of access to affordable insurance would emphasize this point.
Although the industry presented this as a shift from redlining to greenlining, Ansfield calls it brownlining, a muddy mix of new access to insurance, but on discriminatory terms that ended up benefiting absentee landlords, rather than residents. Ansfield describes in absorbing detail the way that insurance companies used the FAIR program to collect high premiums in neighborhoods they’d previously avoided, make money by investing the premiums, and avoid losses by buying reinsurance from investors as far away as Brazil.
Many observers have pointed to the impact redlining had on the Bronx, tracing it back to the 1935 maps created by the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation color-coding neighborhoods as safe or not safe for investment. As the demographic profile of many white Bronx neighborhoods shifted to Black and Latino, banks became less willing to make or renew mortgages, making it extremely difficult for homeowners to refinance their properties, get money for upgrades, or sell.
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Ansfield writes little about this, perhaps feeling that it is well-trod territory, but it is integrally connected to the argument about insurance. The buildings that were torched, Ansfield tells us, were buildings with a large insurance gap – buildings that were insured for far more than they were worth on the market. The gap was partly a product of reckless insurance underwriting, but also the result of declining property values. Declining property values were a product of the unavailability of mortgage financing, racist responses to demographic change, and the decline of public services in the borough. Connecting these factors would strengthen his analysis.
Born in Flames isn’t only about the financial underpinnings of the arson crisis; it also shares the stories of the people who experienced the fires, the people whose homes and neighborhoods were destroyed. Drawing on oral history archives, interviews, and news reports, Ansfield gives readers a sense of what it was like to go to sleep wondering if your building would be torched overnight, or to be forced to move, in some cases more than once, after being burned out of an apartment.
Born in Flames also gives us a sense of the way the culture of the times was influenced by the fires, and how Bronxites dealt with that. The book points to pop culture of the times referencing fires – like the movie “Towering Inferno” and the musical hit “Disco Inferno.” It describes the movement that arose to protest the filming of the movie “Fort Apache” and the derisive responses to Mayor Koch’s policy of putting decals over windows in vacant buildings, making it look from the highway that there were curtains in the windows and plants on the sill. Although sometimes tangential to the main story, these stories are engaging.
Bronx folks are rightly proud that people stayed and fought back against the fires, the abandonment and the divestment. In the book’s final section, Ansfield tells some of their stories. Ansfield describes the struggles of Genevieve Brooks and Mid Bronx Desperados, the Morris Heights Neighborhood Improvement Association and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition to fight back against the arson and get government officials to address the problem. There’s a section on two models of rebuilding that were employed in the Bronx – sweat equity and community development corporations. Ansfield explains how Low-Income Housing Tax Credits drew capital into affordable housing development in the Bronx, terming it “corrective capitalism.”
The book is a rich exploration of how racial capitalism destroyed 20% of the Bronx’ housing stock, and the role played by an insurance program that was intended to protect residential property in urban neighborhoods.
