Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City

Historian Ansfield debuts with a riveting and meticulous chronicle of the wave of arsons-for-profit that burned through America’s cities in the 1970s. The book focuses on the Bronx, which notoriously lost around 20% of its housing stock, though Ansfield argues that the borough is “exemplary” of a lesser-known arson epidemic that devastated neighborhoods of color across the country. Dispelling the racist myth that residents set the fires themselves, the author traces the confluence of financial factors that motivated absentee landlords to burn their neglected, deteriorating properties. These factors included high-cost, low-coverage state-sponsored insurance policies that debuted following the racial uprisings of the 1960s (when insurance companies abandoned “riot-affected areas”); insurance companies’ newfound practice of investing customer premiums for profit, which further inflated premiums to astronomical heights; and city budget cuts that decimated the FDNY. Ansfield shows how “the spoils of arson were manifest”—one arsonist landlord cruised the South Bronx in a pink Cadillac—and movingly conveys the “immense psychic toll” living among the fires took on tenants who, as they tracked the conflagrations’ block-by-block progress, fearfully went to bed with their shoes on; some were even burned out of more than one apartment. The book also unearths the tenant-organized activism, in collaboration with local officials and even some of the insurance companies themselves, that finally ended the fires. The result is an outstanding exposé of the predatory capitalist machinations behind the “Bronx is burning” saga. (Aug.)