Bronx landlord Carmine Lanni knew that even amid New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis you could still make money off of the poor. Lanni began purchasing cheap, low-income buildings and collecting rent while cutting back services. This scheme was common in poor areas, with slumlords squeezing profits out of poor tenants like those in 1895 Belmont Avenue, a building Lanni had acquired for just $5,000 from North Side Savings Bank. But Lanni had his eyes on an even larger windfall: the building’s fire insurance policy, which would pay out upwards of 50 times his purchase price. In the summer of 1976, he hired a local handyman to set the building ablaze, potentially damning the 17 families inside to homelessness or death (pp. 74–75).
The fire on Belmont Avenue was part of a larger arson wave in the 1970s that devastated neighborhoods and terrorized tenants in New York and other cities. As historian Bench Ansfield chronicles in their absorbing new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, the Bronx was the crisis’s epicenter. While the Belmont Avenue tenants’ homes were saved by the handyman botching the arson job, thousands of others were not as fortunate. Between 1970 and 1981, the borough lost around 100,000 housing units to abandonment and arson—approximately one out of every five units of its entire housing stock. Officials and the media largely ignored the devastation for years, until the Bronx became the national symbol of urban decline by 1977. That year, 36 million Americans watched as huge orange flames from a nearby fire illuminated the skyline outside Yankee Stadium during the second game of the World Series.
But why did the Bronx burn? That question is at the center of Anfield’s sagacious work. Many contemporaneous accounts put the blame squarely on the borough’s black and Latino residents, whose numbers rose rapidly from a quarter to nearly two thirds of the population between 1960 and 1980. “People don’t want housing in the South Bronx, or they wouldn’t burn it down,” New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan crassly declared. The false conflation remains so powerful that I still find it among my current Bronx students in the “History of the Bronx” course I teach at CUNY’s Lehman College.
Instead, Ansfield persuasively argues, fires were due to landlord arson. While recent work, including the excellent documentary Decade of Fire (2018), has helped give credence to this explanation, Born in Flames adds groundbreaking detail and layers to this history, unpacking why the arson wave happened, who profited from it, and how it ended. In so doing, the book deftly weaves together the histories of the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) industries alongside the racial landscape of the post–civil rights movement era. As insurance companies threatened to pull out of cities in the aftermath of the mid- and late-1960s racial uprisings, the federal government created a program that offered state-sponsored property insurance called the FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) plan. The program enticed insurers to remain in American cities, while purporting to rectify long-standing discrimination by making them unable to account for race and location in their underwriting guidelines. In practice, however, discriminatory insurance customs remained, and policyholders relegated to FAIR plans were overwhelmingly those in black and brown urban areas who had to pay much more for worse coverage. Those most likely to do so were absentee landlords with little regard for the long-term condition of their buildings or tenants.
The program’s unintended ramifications were disastrous for residents of low-income areas. While landlords in formerly redlined areas were able to access insurance, desperately needed resources for residents and neighborhoods—jobs, services, and investments—continued to recede and housing conditions declined further. The FAIR plan, however, offered landlords an ominous lifeline: government-backed fire-insurance policies that landlords could inflate to assess properties far above their actual market values. This created what Ansfield calls an “insurance gap” between “how a building was valued by insurers (in this case, at exaggerated rates derived from brokers or the owners themselves) and its valuation by mortgage markets (at rock-bottom prices)” (p. 84). The result was a perverse incentive for landlords like Lanni to turn to arson to rid themselves of declining properties and pocket windfall payouts.
At least for a period, insurers took little notice. They could pass along losses through premium hikes and rely on an array of financial schemes to protect themselves against—even profit from—such claims. Even more critical, Ansfield reveals, was that, by the 1970s, insurance companies made far greater profits on dividends and capital appreciation of investments than through insurance. As long as the premium payments continued to flow in, the insurance industry was little bothered. Under the dictates of racial capitalism, there was enormous profit to be had from the devastating conflagration of black and brown neighborhoods.
Fires burned through the Bronx, bringing untold horrors to its poor and working-class tenants. One estimate found that, during the 1970s, fires killed 300 New Yorkers each year. Those who survived fires faced the violence of displacement, which happened at levels “on par with the most devastating” and far better-remembered “urban-renewal projects of a prior age” (p. 115). Residents could return from church to find their buildings aflame and all their possessions destroyed by fire or water. Others had to flee in the night—a harrowing experience that could haunt children and adults for months, if not years. Bronx children learned to sleep in their clothes, shoes bedside, ready to flee at the first sign of fire. Some unlucky families were burned out of their homes two, even three times over the decade.
Yet despite the enormity of fires that raged in New York at this time—there were “13,752 verified structural arsons in 1976” alone—Ansfield astutely notes that one form of housing was largely untouched by fire: public housing (p. 76). Essentially none of the robust concentration of public housing in the Bronx or elsewhere in the city suffered from the arson wave. Nor did the thousands of housing units—many of which were occupied—that came under city ownership in the late 1970s owing to landlords’ tax delinquency. The buildings that landlords or industry could not profit from by fire remained unscathed throughout the decade of arson.
Indeed, once the ability to profit from arson was stripped from the private housing stock, fires in the Bronx and across the country declined considerably. Ansfield skillfully reconstructs the process by which the flames were stamped out over the late 1970s. Much of the credit was due to the efforts of grassroots groups such as the Mid‑Bronx Desperadoes (so named “because we were desperate,” as founder Genevieve Brooks remembered), the Morris Heights Neighborhood Improvement Association, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.
These tenants and organizations, however, were initially stymied by a municipal bureaucracy that was unmoved and then poorly equipped to respond. Arsons—notoriously challenging to prove—fell under the purview of the FDNY’s fire marshals whose numbers were whittled down to just 35 during the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis. Turf wars between the FDNY and NYPD also thwarted progress. It took several years before Bronx tenants, clergy, and organizers garnered enough headway to help spur the creation of government task forces with the requisite staying power and investigatory prowess to catalyze change. Legislative and industry reforms ultimately increased investigatory mechanisms, stripped financial incentives from arson, and improved underwriting practices to close the insurance gap while also increasing the availability of reasonably priced insurance. “Stopping arson meant diminishing its profitability,” which required reforms by “state and corporate actors,” Ansfield notes. “But it took tenants to force their hand” (p. 202).
That Ansfield so thoroughly reconstructs this largely forgotten history is particularly notable given that arson is the “stuff of historians’ nightmares”—a force that “often erases its own archive” (p. 204). Born in Flames draws from the papers of officials, arson task forces, and community groups, along with a wealth of media sources. Ansfield’s extensive use of the excellent Bronx oral history collections housed at Fordham University and Lehman College prove especially fruitful, as they allow the voices of Bronx residents who lived through the arson wave and led the charge to end it fill the pages of Born in Flames.
As Ansfield makes clear in their final chapter, however, reforms extinguished the arson wave but hardly solved the larger housing crisis. The ongoing commodification and financialization of housing meant that Bronx residents continued to struggle to secure safe, decent and affordable housing into the 1980s and beyond. The twin crises of abandonment and arson receded as community development corporations (CDCs), committed to improving housing and services, proliferated in number. While much recent work has heralded the successes of these groups in improving the Bronx, Ansfield is more measured, applauding their often heroic accomplishments, while also gesturing toward their structural limits and recounting how some have been accused by tenants as being little better than the slumlords they replaced. Indeed, in recent years, the gaining momentum of the housing-justice movement toward more decommodified housing—such as community land trusts, like those advocates by Bronx Community Land Trust, or for new public housing—has come about not just because of the ongoing failures of the private housing market, but also in part because of the perceived limitations of CDC developers and operators.
Though heartbreaking at times, Born in Flames is highly compelling reading that brims with astute observations and clever prose. While buttressed by scholarly rigor, Ansfield brings an experienced activist’s lens to their work—offering perceptive insights on what the arson wave reveals about racism, capitalism, and power. Indeed, Born in Flames is a rare scholarly work that not only recovers a vital, overlooked period of history, but provides critical lessons for the enduring struggle for racial and economic justice today.
