Throughout the 1970s, explosive fires devastated neighborhoods in the Bronx and other U.S. cities, especially in low-income communities of color.
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Residents of these communities were often blamed for this arson. Contrary to this common assumption, Assistant Professor of History Bench Ansfield explains that landlords set the most destructive fires to collect insurance payouts.
In their new book Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, Ansfield chronicles this wave of landlord arson from 1968 until the early 1980s.
“These fires have evaded historical scrutiny and haven’t been as remembered partly because they’ve been conflated with the uprisings of the 1960s,” said Ansfield. “I argue that these fires weren’t lit for protest but rather for profit, most of which flowed into the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) industries. I’m interested in this turn toward financialization and how it reaches its peak in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement.”
According to Ansfield, financialization, the historical process by which the profit center of an economy shifts from manufacturing to financial activity, is a major driver of housing instability and real estate volatility.
“The embers of these fires have forged the city we know today, especially when thinking about how the urban economy is defined by volcanic real estate booms and occasional destructive busts,” they explained. “Since the 1970s, financialization has reshaped how the housing market works. Rents and mortgage prices have skyrocketed while wages have generally stagnated. The arson wave marks a birth of this new financial order.”
In their book, Ansfield introduces the term “brownlining” to describe the destructive insurance practices forced on low-income communities of color under the guise of racial redress.
They explain that brownlining marked both a departure from and an acceleration of redlining, or the practice of refusing credit, insurance or other financial services on the basis of race.
“Brownlining dramatically increased access to insurance, specifically in neighborhoods of color, but did so on the discriminatory terms of the substandard insurance contract,” Ansfield said. “These insurance policies were exorbitantly expensive but only covered basic risks.”
Ansfield’s research demonstrates that as the FIRE industries surpassed manufacturing in the 1970s, these industries started reshaping Black and brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit.
“This narrative helps us see how the redlining era transitioned into the age of the subprime loan,” Ansfield added, referring to the predatory mortgages that precipitated the Great Recession of 2007–2009.
In response, tenants led resistance movements to end the firestorm. They organized hundreds of tenant unions and block associations, created early warning systems that identified arson-prone buildings and pressured their insurers to crack down on arsonist landlords.
“Residents overcame these impossible odds in stopping the fires from burning their cities,” said Ansfield. “They had virtually no allies and little structural power, but they built a movement that was extremely effective. Tenants have the greatest stake in ensuring the habitability of their cities and need to be recognized as crucial guarantors of housing stability. They’re the heroes of these stories.”