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

A revelatory account of the wave of arson-for-profit that hit American cities in the 1970s, and of the tenants who put out the fires and reclaimed their neighborhoods.


“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” Supposedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, the phrase encapsulated an entire chaotic era in this nation’s history. Across the 1970s, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, leveling poor communities of color. However, as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the majority of those fires weren’t set by residents—as is usually assumed—but by landlords seeking insurance payouts. Ansfield introduces the term “brownlining” for the subprime insurance practices imposed by the federal government and insurance industry after 1968, and shows why, with buildings worth more dead than alive, landlords turned to the torch. In an expansive narrative stretching from the Bronx to Britain to Brazil, Ansfield tracks the flows of money that signaled the arrival of our financialized age. From the ashes arose the modern tenant movement and the fight for housing justice amid a new era of housing insecurity.

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