Born in Flames: A Guest Post by Bench Ansfield
Bench Ansfield breaks down a common misconception around a chaotic time in American history through a detailed examination of housing insecurity across the globe. Read on for an exclusive essay from Bench on writing Born in Flames.
Hardcover $31.99
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
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Hardcover $31.99
The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s—and its legacy today.
The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s—and its legacy today.
The first time I heard the story, I thought it was an urban legend. A neighbor in Philadelphia, where I was living after college, told me that the landlords of the Bronx had burned down their buildings en masse during the 1970s. Who would believe such a thing? It had the air of a conspiracy theory.
I began to look into it, if only to confirm my own doubts. But everything I read seemed to suggest that there was something to the story, even though I couldn’t find an authoritative history on the subject.
This was the early 2010s, and the wreckage from the subprime mortgage crisis was everywhere. “Follow the money” had become a favorite maxim among a certain subset of historians, and I took their advice. Sure enough, I soon discovered a paper trail proving that landlords had burned down tens of thousands of apartment units for the insurance money – not just in the Bronx, but in cities across the United States, and especially in neighborhoods of color. Before long, I had fallen deep down an insurance rabbit hole from which I haven’t yet emerged. Until this moment, I was like any average person: I wanted to think about insurance as little as possible. Few topics can compete when it comes to soul-sapping tedium. But the more I read about insurance, the more I saw that it’s everywhere: a hidden financial infrastructure that imperceptibly shapes our lives and landscapes.
Figuring out why landlords would burn down their own buildings was relatively straightforward, at least when compared to the question of why insurance companies would pay the resulting claims. Tens of millions of dollars were at stake, and insurers aren’t typically easy to deceive. It took me ten years to answer that question and piece together the history that became BORN IN FLAMES.
The torching of wide swaths of the metropolis may strike some as a bizarre event in the distant past. Yet readers will discover that it is very much a part of how our cities came to be. Out of the embers of the arson wave was forged the city we know today: one defined by volcanic real estate booms, economy-cratering busts, and an ongoing decline in housing stability. The world in which a solidly built home could generate more value by ruination than habitation is the same world in which homelessness, eviction, and foreclosure have become defining aspects of urban life.
Though this story is disturbing, threads of hope and possibility are woven throughout the book. The only reason that the firestorm was eventually quelled was that ordinary residents banded together to stop the burning. Their struggles even extended into the battlegrounds of culture – in disco anthems like “Hot Stuff” and exploitation films like Fort Apache, The Bronx. I wrote the book to recover these lost histories, but also to help readers understand how much power we have in shaping the cities of today.