During the 1970s, a wave of arson spread through American cities. Contrary to conventional belief, these fires were not started by residents but by landlords interested in collecting insurance payments. In their new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, historian Bench Ansfield chronicles the untold story of mass arson fueled by perverse insurance incentives and the ensuing tenant-led resistance. In the following interview, published in collaboration with the History & Political Economy Project, Andrew Anatasi and Bench Ansfield discuss how arson became profitable, how residents organized to stop it, and what this tells us about the ongoing interplay between property and racial capitalism.
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Congratulations on the publication of Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City. Over the past few months it has been wonderful to see your scholarship reach such a wide audience. The book focuses on the wave of arson that ravaged the Bronx in the 1970s. Your research shows that arson was not primarily motivated by the rage or resentment of working-class Bronxites, as many conventional narratives suggest. Instead, you emphasize the intertwining roles played by the federal government and the property insurance industry. Can you explain how property insurance works, how state policies relating to it changed in 1968, and why that shift kindled so many fires?
Property insurance is a subject that comes off as so dull, lifeless, or complex that we tend not to lend it much attention or analysis until we’re forced to – usually in moments of crisis. Yet it turns out that insurance is utterly mesmerizing, and that’s in part because insurers quantify emotions like fear, hope, and mourning. They can offer an almost transparent window into the affective logic of capitalism.
Because insurance is so understudied, we know practically nothing about property insurance redlining; almost all the existing research on redlining is about the mortgage side. Yet property insurance redlining is actually a pretty different beast when compared to its mortgage analogue, and it’s equally important, since no mortgage can be written without property insurance. In other words, no property insurance effectively means no loans.
Insurance redlining began in the late 1940s – a bit later than its counterpart in the mortgage sector –thanks to both rapid suburbanization and some deregulatory initiatives that were specific to theinsurance field. For the next two decades, redlining practices continued to spread. And then, in the 1960s, the mass uprisings hit, sending insurers into a racialized panic. Dollar losses paled in comparison to those resulting from natural disasters, but the industry was convinced that unremitting Black revolt would define the American metropolis for the foreseeable future. And so the insurance market in U.S. cities dried up almost entirely.
When President Lyndon Johnson convened the Kerner Commission in 1967, he established a separate committee to focus more narrowly on the insurance crisis. The committee aimed to both bail out the insurance industry and end redlining practices. It proposed that states establish FAIR [Fair Access to Insurance Requirements] plans: public-private pools of all insurers operating in that state. The proposals were promptly enacted into law the following year, and FAIR plans were set up around the country in 1968.
Despite presenting themselves as a racial justice remedy, FAIR plans sold insurance policies that were exorbitantly priced, failed to protect against basic risks, and often lacked proper inspection procedures. Those best positioned to benefit were absentee landlords. Though access to insurance did increase, this occurred alongside continual redlining by banks and mortgage lenders and all of the cutbacks and disinvestment that accompanied the urban crisis, putting landlords in a position where it was often in their best interest to torch their buildings for the insurance proceeds.
How did money flow between small landlords, insurance and re-insurance agencies, and the government? In other words, how did arson become such a complex business involving what you call a “triangle trade in risk”?
For much of the 1970s, the FAIR plans proved to be remarkably indifferent to the underwriting losses resulting from fraudulent claims. That was partly because FAIR plans were pools of all insurers operating in a state, which meant they could distribute those losses evenly across the entire industry. FAIR plans were notorious for over-insuring buildings for many times what they were actually worth, and they often declined to pre-inspect buildings or investigate loss claims.
Meanwhile, rental real estate – especially, though not exclusively, in rustbelt cities – was experiencing a crisis of profitability. In New York, landlords blamed rent control for their shrinking profit margins, but these issues plagued urban real estate in cities across the country, most of which did not have any such system of rent control. The problem wasn’t rent control; it was mortgage redlining, industrial relocation, and white and capital flight. Once landlords realized they had little chance of selling their buildings for the prices they desired, they looked for ways to liquidate the assets as quickly as possible. Arson became one such way.
By the second half of the 1970s, the FAIR plans had enticed some private insurers to reenter the U.S. urban market, but many of these firms were unregulated companies with shady business practices. Their unscrupulous underwriting further exacerbated the arson wave, which hit its peak just in time for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. In the Bronx, the epicenter of the wreckage, some neighborhoods lost 80% of their housing stock. But again – this wasn’t just a Bronx problem. It was happening in cities across the country, from Boston to Los Angeles.
One of the mechanisms that these unregulated insurance companies employed to absorb the outsized losses was reinsurance. Reinsurance is like insurance for insurance companies. A firm purchases reinsurance to pass along some of its liabilities to other firms, thus reducing its exposure to risk. This wasn’t a new financial technology, but the reinsurance sector experienced major growth in the 1970s – a symptom of the financialization age. Like an actuarial pinball machine, the reinsurance boom involved the bouncing of risks from one reinsurer to another, then to another.
In a small archive in the Bronx, I came upon a declassified FEMA memo outlining these financial circuits. The source laid out in granular detail the serpentine financial networks that drove what was, in all likelihood, the largest arson ring in New York history. That network stretched from a large arson ring in the Bronx to a Florida-based insurance company, then to Lloyd’s of London, and finally to a Brazilian reinsurance firm, which basically offered insurance to the insurer. This network, which spanned from the Bronx to the Caribbean to Britain to Brazil, made up a triangular trade in risk, one that followed the same paths as the more familiar triangular trade, and even involved the same institutional actors – namely, Lloyd’s of London.
Arson rates began to decline in New York when community-based organizations pushed the city to establish an Arson Strike Force and increase the number of fire marshals on the city’s payroll. How do you see the interplay between grassroots social movementsand public-sector initiatives during these years?
One of the ambitions of this book is restoring tenants to the center of urban history. Histories of capitalism and U.S. cities tend to foreground homeowners over renters. But here tenants show themselves to be major catalysts of change.
In the Bronx, an ad hoc movement of tenants figured out before anyone else that these fires were being lit for profit. I tell the story of Genevieve Brooks, who moved to the neighborhood around Crotona Park in the early 1960s and watched white flight ravage the neighborhood. She launched a tenant union to try to save her building, then a block association to save her block, but in both cases, she realized she was thinking too small. She eventually created a neighborhood-wide organization for young people called Seabury Daycare. When she and the children in her care noticed an uptick in fires in the early 1970s, they began collecting data. They soon detected a pattern to the blazes, and she approached the borough’s fire marshals with her suspicions, but her concerns were quickly dismissed. Undeterred, she and the young people at Seabury created a public awareness campaign that likely inspired the city’s first anti-arson task force. I still find it astounding and instructive that a daycare center was at the frontlines in the fight against landlord arson.
Ultimately, though, grassroots organizing on the building, block, or neighborhood level proved incapable of extinguishing the firestorm on its own. The fires would only subside when the profit was taken out of them, and that required state action against insurers and landlords. Following years of agitation from below, the city and state passed numerous financial reforms and created the Arson Strike Force, which played a decisive role coordinating a crackdown against landlords.
Your book also surveys the movies and music produced in and about the Bronx during this period. How does cultural history factor into your narrative?
Because the news media and the state were silent about the arson wave until the late 1970s, these songs, films, ads, and other cultural productions offer rare glimpses into how everyday people made sense of the burnings. Fire was everywhere in 1970s pop culture, from “Disco Inferno” to The Towering Inferno to the Prairie Fire manifesto. If there was one master trope of the decade, fire could well be it. Seemingly every other disco lyric was about heat, fever, burning, or some other sexually-charged invocation of fire. Even the disco dance floor – with its smoke machines, strobe lights, and convulsing bodies – was a sort of simulacrum of a fire.
As it always does, culture served as a battlefield of contested meaning. One of the tenant-led mobilizations I chronicle is the Committee Against Fort Apache, which formed in 1980 to protest and undermine the Paul Newman Bronxploitation film, Fort Apache, The Bronx. The campaign, led former members of the Young Lords, was remarkably successful in sabotaging the ambitions of the filmmakers.
Let’s take a step back. You situate this wave of arson as taking place during a phase of rampant financialization, in a society dominated by racial capitalism. Can you talk about how, as a historian, you approach the relationship between structure and conjuncture? How should we understand deeply rooted and long-simmering forces in relation to contingent events and moments of change?
I see Born in Flames as a history of financialization from the ground-up, with race at its center. The arson wave offers an unlikely window into how finance overtook manufacturing as the driver of urban economies in the 1970s U.S.
The firestorm was made possible by two massive transformations that were intertwined in ways that are rarely acknowledged: the meteoric rise of the so-called FIRE industries (finance, insurance, and real estate), and the changing racial politics that followed the legislative victories of the civil rights movement. Building on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s work on “predatory inclusion,” the book argues that the FAIR plan marked a real departure from the redlining era, but its high-cost, low-value policies left intact the racially-stratified structure of the property insurance market. I call this process insurance brownlining to capture the sedimented relationship between redlining’s residual presence and the FAIR plan’s abrupt infusion of insurance access (often championed as greenlining).
Brownlining generated major losses for the insurance industry, but companies were able to absorb these losses through an assortment of industry practices, all of them legal, that illustrated the perverse incentives opened up by financialization. For 300 years, the profitability of insurance companies had hinged on the loss ratio: the ratio of losses paid out to policyholders versus premiums earned. But in the 1970s, the profit center moved elsewhere – to the gains made by investing premiums in money markets, bonds, stocks, and other investments. Hunger for premiums as “seed money” meant lowering underwriting standards and tolerating higher losses. This “cash-flow underwriting” was both a creature of the conjuncture and a harbinger of a longer-term transformation in racial capitalism.
Your research process involved digging through archives, interviewing people, and analyzing documents. Rather than uncritically relying on official statistics, you composed your evidence methodically. Can you explain why we should be suspicious of existing data?
I think of arson data as a statistical minefield. New York City’s arson numbers were extremely unreliable and inconsistent in these years, a product of both the fiscal crisis and the city’s generally poor recordkeeping for much of the decade. This was true across many municipalities. In order for a fire to be recorded as arson, it had to be proven as such in a court of law. That depended on a thorough forensic investigation by a fire marshal, but thanks to staffing reductions and budget cuts, there simply weren’t enough marshals to investigate every fire.
Two in five suspicious fires in New York went uninvestigated in 1976, and fires in vacant buildings, which would have been marked suspicious in any other era, were instead recorded as accidental simply because of staffing issues. After 1979, when many marshals were rehired, the force was able to produce much cleaner data. But that improvement in recordkeeping paradoxically generated new elements of variability and statistical noise across the decade, making it difficult to measure trends longitudinally.
This means there’s a lot we just can’t know about the etiology of the fires. For that reason, the book refrains from arguing that most of the blazes were set by landlords; that’s not something we can determine with any accuracy, at least with the data we have. What can be said with confidence, though, is that landlords set the most ruinous fires, and in general they played a precipitating role in the destruction of these buildings. Caveats aside, a recent study by the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago and Philadelphia did crunch the numbers and confirmed the book’s core argument that there was a strong statistical link between FAIR plan underwriting and the fires.
No matter how clean the data, however, the toll of the arson wave can’t really be captured by numbers. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman describes mortality tables and unemployment data as “murderous abstractions” – a fitting phrase. Ultimately, the book relies most heavily on the accounts of tenants themselves. I conducted oral histories, and I was also extremely fortunate to be among the first generation of researchers to make use of the 300-plus oral histories conducted by the Bronx African American History Project at Fordham University. The collection is a treasure trove, and I hope more scholars make use of it.
Your work makes important contributions to scholarship on housing as a commodity. You show that arson overwhelmingly afflicted privately owned housing, while public housing was largely spared. You also offer up a new concept of “threat equity” for thinking about how working-class people in the Bronx are resisting displacement today. I see Born in Flames speaking to a wide range of urgent conversations about affordability, gentrification, and rent.
I’m really glad that you brought up threat equity, as it hasn’t come up yet in other interviews. The Bronx is now facing a very different threat than it did in the 1970s. Gentrification was relatively slow to come to the borough, but it hit hard beginning in the mid-2010s. Following the lead of Bronx anti-gentrification activists, as well as geographers like Neil Smith, I frame disinvestment and gentrification as mutually reinforcing movements in an ongoing cycle of dispossession and displacement. The link bridging the mean streets of the 1970s with the supertall glass monoliths of 2025 is FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) capitalism, which has been a chief driver of housing insecurity and real estate volatility for the past 50 years.
Bronx anti-gentrification activists know this well. In response to the flurry of development in the southernmost reaches of the borough, groups like Take Back the Bronx have staked a claim to the neighborhood that’s grounded in their collective survivorship of the arson wave (or that of their forebears). Threat equity describes this assertion of community ownership and belonging made stronger by past hardship and struggle. The term is a riff on sweat equity, a housing rehabilitation movement that emerged in the mid-1970s to reimagine property ownership as a function of resident labor, rather than financial equity. In a similar sense, threat equity insists on a de-financialized belonging that’s determined not by the ability to pay rent or a mortgage, but rather by community survivorship and history.
It goes without saying that demands for affordability and the right to remain have resounded far beyond the Bronx, and they clearly played a decisive role in the movement to elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor of NYC. In many ways, the emergence of the modern tenant movement in the 1970s set the stage for this moment. As the housing justice movement has come into its power, it has redefined tenancy as a durable basis for class formation. Even amid the countless horrors of the present, this is one of the most hopeful developments I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Daniel Immerwahr concludes his review of your book in the New Yorker by suggesting that “the Bronx’s burned-out homes were monuments not just to greed but to indifference.” From this point of view, the 1970s Bronx was not a profitable site of extraction but an irrelevant wasteland. This seems difficult to square with your explanation of how insurance premiums were invested for profit.
On another level, it strikes me that your framework of racial capitalism does not emphasize greed but rather describes a system of impersonal compulsion, for ordinary people as well as for capitalists, from the insurance industrialists to the petty landlords all the way down to the “torches” themselves – with differential culpability to be sure – but conscripted all to play roles in the production and ever-expanding accumulation of value. Asking which percentage of fires were set by whom seems like a red herring.
Moreover, any neighborhood experience of disinvestment, seen from the angle of someone like Neil Smith, whom you’ve mentioned, must be understood in relation to larger cycles of valorization, both geographically as capital moves, but also diachronically as it tills the soil for a future season of profitable investment.
Daniel Immerwahr has been putting out excellent recent work on the history of fire, but I was disappointed by his review of my book. As you note, what’s most instructive about his piece is how it interprets racial capitalism as a theory and framework. Immerwahr concludes that the arson wave wasn’t driven by racial capitalism because there weren’t sufficient profits to squeeze from the Bronx – an argument, it bears noting, that’s at odds with the central claims of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit, in addition to the work of Neil Smith. His counterargument is that this saga wasn’t driven by exploitation and extraction so much as indifference. Yet these lines of domination aren’t mutually exclusive; in fact, they’re reciprocal, cumulative. And their confluence has been a major focus of critics of racial capitalism like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who argues that “organized abandonment” has been a central force of the post-1960s period.
What’s more, the book is, as you say, alert to the dangers of overemphasizing the role of greed and predation as the operative elements at play. Certainly, with the sprawling arson rings that fill its pages, there’s no shortage of conspirators here. But I caution that there is limited benefit in viewing the saga as a conspiracy, as the genre conventions of true crime would have us do. Though human hands lit those fires, they were set in motion by forces far more impersonal and far-reaching than a mere criminal cabal. The carnage was the bitter fruit of financialization. The question we must answer is less whodunit than whatdunit.
It’s noteworthy that the one other dissenting review of the book similarly stems from a misapprehension of racial capitalism as a framework. In The Nation, Samuel Zipp, another scholar whom I’ve long admired, contends that my book is unsure as to whether this is a tale of racial capitalism or financialization. Yet these are of course nested concepts: financialization describes a dominant tendency within racial capitalism in the post-Fordist era. Whereas Immerwahr adopts a narrow definition of racial capitalism as pure greed, Zipp seems to read it as merely the intersection of capitalism with people of color. Here, again, Gilmore is instructive: “all capitalism is racial from its beginning.”
What struck me most about Zipp’s review is where it concludes: “Sometimes it seems that the ultimate villain of Born in Flames is private property itself.” I hope so! I was expecting this critique from an outlet like the Wall Street Journal, not from The Nation. That’s not to say that this book is a polemic to abolish landlords – readers can draw their own conclusions. But the right to shelter is a widely recognized human right, and in the U.S. we rely heavily on the private rental market to meet that essential need, especially for the most vulnerable members of our society. That market is failing us miserably.
Meanwhile – and this is to return to your earlier point – I find it hugely clarifying that public housing was the only type of housing spared by the inferno. The Bronx has one of the greatest concentrations of public housing anywhere in the country, and yet these developments were virtually unscathed by the blazes. On some blocks, the only buildings left standing were those owned by the state. By this measure, at least, the safest place to live in the 1970s was social housing – a wildly different conclusion than most scholars and pundits have drawn about public housing in the late twentieth century! What would it mean to take that finding seriously? I see it as the ultimate support for a demand the housing justice movement has been making for years: we need an immediate, permanent, and fully subsidized reinvestment in green social housing.
