The Uncertain History of the Bronx Fires

Few images from the 1970s still resonate like those of the destruction of the Bronx. Block after block of once-doughty apartment buildings, abandoned and burned; whole streets, even neighborhoods, left strewn with charred remains and blackened ruins; just a few churches, storefronts, or other survivors spiking up from the fields of rubble. Scenes like this—repeated across New York and other postindustrial cities—stood in for the very idea of the Bronx, just as the name of the beleaguered borough served as a synecdoche for the whole idea of urban decay. Half a century on, such scenes have become a kind of stock repository of city clichés, requiring the obligatory comparison to Dresden or Hiroshima, as well as the relentless “the Bronx is burning” memes. But all along, some fundamental questions have gotten lost or obscured in the haze surrounding ruin porn, or in mass forgetting and its handmaiden, pre-gentrification nostalgia: How exactly did this happen? What set the Bronx burning?

Common answers to these questions tend to stumble out, bleary-eyed, from the same fog of faulty memory. It was arsonists of some kind—bored and lawless kids, maybe , or the borough’s notorious street gangs. Or it was vandals bent on harvesting metals from the blitzed ruins of torched apartments. Sometimes it was welfare cheats, too—families who burned down buildings to get city relocation funds and new apartments. Or maybe it was just negligence, the consequence of a cigarette left burning or an oven left on. Driven mad by deprivation and chaos, Bronxites lost all sense and burned their own neighborhoods down. They did it to themselves.

Some of those things did happen. But in numbers large enough to deliver such pervasive devastation? No, that’s absurd; it makes no sense. Twenty percent of the Bronx’s housing stock burned—over 100,000 units—and fires also claimed vast acreage in other American cities. Only racism underpins the faulty logic of such claims.

The truth is that most of the fires were set or commissioned by landlords. But why would they burn down their own property? Fifty years ago, neighborhood organizers, journalists, firefighters, local politicians, law enforcement, and municipal and federal investigatory commissions uncovered the answer. For the historian Bench Ansfield, whose Born in Flames returns us to the scene of these crimes, the primary culprit is both banal and all-encompassing—insurance.

“We knew that arson was for profit,” recalled Genevieve Brooks, the founder of the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, one of the first community-development organizations that tried to douse the flames. “It wasn’t that a junkie went to sleep in a building…it was a wholesale business for everybody. The landlords collected…from the insurance companies.” Even so, the question remains: How could this happen?

The puzzle that Ansfield pieces together began in 1968 with the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements program, an obscure bit of civil-rights-era federal policy. Designed to counter the “insurance redlining” that unfolded when big private insurers withdrew coverage from landlords and businesses in riot-scarred urban neighborhoods, FAIR insurance sought to backstop the private insurance market with government funds.

FAIR plans kept landlords solvent and urban property markets alive, but they also featured high rates—four to five times greater on average than the regular market—and inferior coverage. Market-rate insurance calculated its rates from industry-wide pools, dispersing the risk. But FAIR plans, the insurance underwriters argued, were taking on the kinds of bad risk that should be sequestered from the rest of the industry. These plans based their rates only on pools of similar FAIR properties—which, being in high-risk areas, carried greater costs and defaults. As Ansfield writes, years of urban segregation and deprivation had bred new forms of financial discrimination—it was “Jim Crow, insurance-style.”

Still, FAIR insurance rushed in to fill the gap left by the retreat of traditional insurance, which disappeared along with jobs, capital, and social services. Even if FAIR rates were based on a segregated pool, the losses would be distributed across all the insurers taking part in the program—meaning that no one company would feel the pain. And so, even as losses skyrocketed throughout the fire-ridden ’70s, individual insurance companies invested heavily in FAIR plans: underwriting policies on beleaguered urban real estate at inflated valuations, passing on the mounting losses to policyholders in the form of higher premiums, buying insurance on their own insurance policies (so-called “reinsurance”), and paying out on claims with little investigation into the causes.

All of this was redoubled, too, by a turn toward the financialization of insurance. Where insurance companies had once made money solely on underwriting—carefully calibrating the risk of losses to the volume of premiums collected—by the ’70s they were increasingly turning to financial markets, and the era’s high insurance rates, to guarantee profits. Premiums became capital to be invested in stocks and bonds. Even as the underwriting losses jumped, profit could still be found as long as the firms kept collecting premiums and turning them over on Wall Street. The companies saw this as a win-win situation: profits for them, capital to support the expansion of underwriting, and fresh streams of cash to pay out on the mounting claims from their FAIR business.

Ansfield calls the whole process “insurance brownlining”—the result of trying to answer insurance redlining with a poorly regulated green light for expensive, subpar policies hopped up on speculation and inflated values. If the insurers had been incentivized to turn a blind eye to their own losses, their actions set in motion an altogether more perverse and tragic series of incentives for many of their policyholders in neighborhoods like the Bronx.

Urban landlords had always existed on tight margins, using rents to keep their buildings afloat. But the profit on rental properties lay less in rent than in equity. As Homefront, a 1970s tenant and housing-research organization, showed in a report on the causes of housing abandonment, the true value of an urban property lay in its stored capital—profit that was realizable only if it could be remortgaged or sold. Yet as banks redlined places like the Bronx, and property values dipped rather than surged, those deals became less and less profitable—or even possible. When the landlords’ “hopes of future gain are dashed,” the Homefront researchers wrote, they lose their business model. They often fell behind on taxes and repairs, “milking” buildings for cash and exploiting tenants until they could sell or find another way to get out from under.

This is where the high rates and inflated valuations cut deepest. Landlords found themselves with declining buildings and rising maintenance costs, but also spiking insurance premiums and out-of-balance valuations. Capital was no longer stored in real estate, but rather in insurance. Landlords tipped over into what Ansfield calls the “insurance gap”—the moral void that opened between the high insurance valuation and the cratering market value of their property. For many landlords, the options were stark and ugly: hang on, exploiting your tenants and hemorrhaging money; cut your losses in a fire sale; abandon the building; or turn to fire itself to recoup your investment with an insurance claim.

The Bronx’s landlords were mostly small-time capitalists, often Jewish and sometimes Italian American, with roots in the borough’s pre–World War II working class. Many were also absentee landlords—they’d followed their neighbors out to the suburbs in the postwar years. Their connections to the now Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods they had left behind had waned and often soured, exacerbating the already powerful financial incentives to treat tenants instrumentally rather than humanely. Brownlining and the insurance gap shredded these frayed ties and led many landlords to take the direst of paths. They hired “torches”—most often young locals trapped in what Ansfield aptly calls “the ambivalence and anguish of survival work”—then issued surreptitious warnings to tenants (or not, in many cases) before their paid arsonists touched off a blaze in the top story, where it would do enough damage to make an insurance claim viable but endanger the fewest lives.

Much of the Bronx’s devastation went like this: landlord by landlord, fire by fire, with the perverse incentives spreading as fast as the flames themselves. But those incentives eventually attracted bigger fish. By the middle of the decade, whole arson rings had sprung up, launching conspiracies between landlords who had bought up multiple buildings and shady webs of transnational insurance interests. Ansfield traces the story of one circuit of capital—uncovered by federal investigators in the 1970s—from the Bronx, where a local insurance broker wrote substandard policies for criminal landlords bent on collecting post-blaze payouts; to Florida, where a fly-by-night underwriter backed his Bronx associate; to London, where a rogue Lloyd’s of London partner ran a syndicate that specialized in risky and unethical policies; to Brazil, where Lloyd’s bought reinsurance on the bundled policies, distributing its risk to a Rio de Janeiro firm. At every step in this unholy chain, crooks and their cronies—witting and unwitting—found themselves in a position to rake in profits from a predatory system that ensured everyone turned a blind eye to the destruction of the very places that “insurance” was supposed to protect.

Details like this spill out from scene after scene of Born in Flames. Ansfield has worked hard to herd the results of their prodigious research into line, wrangling a recondite and knotty tale of insurance-policy minutiae, financial chicanery, and obscure municipal-commission history into shape, while gamely trying to throw a rope around all manner of loosely related ephemera, from the familiar (references to disco and early hip-hop or the origins of “broken windows” criminology) to the less expected (the vogue for the idea of “burnout” in pop psychology). Not all of this quite lands—it’s difficult to tell what specific underlying dilemmas of the fire years emerge from the concept of “burnout” or the Trammps’ radio hit “Disco Inferno.”

Where it does resonate—in the analysis, for instance, of the protests over the Paul Newman film Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981) and its depictions of the borough’s suffering—Ansfield’s energy tends to arise from the people of the Bronx and their experience of the burning years. Insurance brownlining and its discontents come alive in the tales of families startled awake by firebombs in the night, or the traumatized renters, displaced multiple times, who became practiced in the art of fleeing fire. These stories put flesh on the bones of the arson rackets. Also, the kids who thrilled and despaired at the sight of fires night after night, sometimes making grim sport of the spectacle even as the flames crept toward their own homes, or the handymen confronting the moral crisis of signing on as “torches”—their accounts give the book its recurring thread and keep readers attuned to the ways that finance and policy impact people’s lives and neighborhoods.

Ultimately, Ansfield reserves pride of place for the organizers and residents who banded together to fight back. Eventually, painstakingly, community groups launched research initiatives to expose the various arson-for-profit schemes and goad politicians and police into a crackdown. They also started the earliest “sweat equity” groups to save buildings and the community-development corporations to erect new housing. Over the course of the ’70s, city officials and law-enforcement agencies finally began to take notice of the community outrage, and a series of municipal and federal investigations dug up the details. New regulations followed, and the burning years tapered off by the 1980s.

What does this history tell us? If it wasn’t a season of madness, then what was it? Orthodox neoliberals might suggest that it was all the government’s fault: The FAIR program’s interference corrupted market efficiency, setting up “moral hazards” for everyone that led to the evils that Ansfield chronicles. This has a seductive logic; it’s certainly what many landlords believed. They had long campaigned against city controls on rents, which they maintained threatened their livelihoods and would inevitably lead to deterioration and abandonment. But they could not explain why this was so in the South Bronx and not on the Upper West Side, Ansfield notes, or in other parts of the city where landlords chafed under rent controls but enjoyed profits nonetheless.

Meanwhile, public housing rarely, if ever, burned. There was no profit in it, and so the many New York City Housing Authority projects dotting the Bronx continued to offer spots of calm in a landscape flaring with the embers of nightly blazes. Shelley Sanderson, who grew up in the South Bronx’s Saint Mary’s Park Houses, remembered frequent and scary fires burning in the buildings across Cauldwell Avenue but never in her own development. Across New York City in 1977—at the height of the burning years, when almost 170,000 families lived in public housing—a Bronx district attorney found that the city reported no significant structural fires in its hundreds of buildings. The roots of the urban deprivation that led to the fire years lay not in government action alone, but in the specific ways that private capital and public power combined to favor certain parts of the metropolis over others. Where government intervention had harmed the city’s vitality—as in the history of redlining—it was by way of perpetuating the discriminatory growth and development pioneered by the private real estate industry.

The role of insurance in setting the city alight pulls back the curtain on a number of larger, enabling structural conditions. As Ansfield explains, despite the very real existence of individual and collective collusion to burn buildings and collect payoffs, arson for profit was more than a conspiracy. The fires were instead evidence of a widespread complicity, on the part of landlords and insurers, with two larger forces—financialization and racial capitalism—that shapes the system of private property.

“What appears as a wasteland in the Bronx may be an acceptable loss in the board rooms of London or Lower Manhattan,” wrote two arson researchers for this magazine in 1986, surveying the wreckage after the fires receded. Less understood, perhaps, is the outright dependence of profit on visible and scandalous destruction, as long as it can be explained away with the easy con of racism.

Insurance is a necessary part of economies based on risk: It spreads the hazards around, supporting capital investment in property and overall economic growth. What to make, then, of a situation in which insurance incentivized the destruction of property, of so-called capital stock—the very building blocks of accumulation? Born in Flames argues that this paradox is explained by the fact that insurance is also always implicated in the perpetual entanglement of profit-seeking and racism, shoring up an American property system that has long delivered gain and security for white people, while putting communities of color at greater rather than lesser risk. By these lights, the FAIR plans touched off a particularly devastating round of what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has called “predatory inclusion”: They promised restored access to coverage but delivered inferior insurance on unequal terms that redoubled discrimination and encouraged arson for profit. This effect was exacerbated by post-1960s finance and its encouragement of “the trading of money over the trading of goods,” as insurance companies shifted their attention from community well-being to Wall Street speculation, making premiums a measure of extraction rather than local investment.

This is convincing, insofar as one accepts the analytic abstraction. What’s interesting, though, is the way Ansfield appears to endorse several different analytical models. From one angle, the problem is just business as usual—the continuing way that racial division stratifies society, producing the winners and losers required for capitalist profit-making, a process that links the burning Bronx back to housing discrimination, Native dispossession, empire, and slavery. Along the way, this overarching force meets financialization’s periodic and perverse mutation of capitalism’s interests in fueling growth and prosperity. However, in other moments, Ansfield appears to endorse the opposite idea: that modern capital accumulation always takes the form of finance, squeezing the hard stuff of life into the cells of a spreadsheet and then setting it loose on the market to be traded, where it will inevitably be yoked to unequal exploitation. Finance is either a leader or a follower, and insurance is either an accelerant—the accessory to periodic bouts of malfeasance—or the universal protector of regular financial predation.

Turning this complex round and round to look for linear causation may be beside the point: Depending on where one looks, there are bound to be tensions in the details. One might reasonably object, for instance, that both the FAIR plans and regular market insurance became fodder for speculation, raising the question of how financialization was particularly yoked to racial capitalism. Landlords appear as both unfortunate cogs in the machine and the rapacious reapers of “vast fortunes” at different times in the book. The FAIR plans might be emblems of civil-rights achievement or an attempt at “co-opting” the movement’s energy. As total as this system might appear, some could argue that what Ansfield actually shows is how the regular processes of reform—agitation, investigation, and regulation—undid arson for profit. By these lights, the fires were local tragedies, the product of a national urban disinvestment that could be and eventually was turned around and sorted out, even as the larger forces of urban inequality that produced them continued unabated.

But for Ansfield, that’s precisely the point: The lessons of the burning years still echo. “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,” they write. Sometimes it seems that the ultimate villain of Born in Flames is private property itself. This, too, soars high above the messier details of the Bronx. Public housing managers may have escaped the cruel choices that led the borough’s landlords to the torch, but they have always had to struggle with conditions and incentives that can lead to regular and ongoing negligence. Likewise, when Ansfield turns to the attempts to rebuild the Bronx, they distinguish between sweat equity (neighbors banding together to cooperatively rebuild and own buildings) and community-development corporations—nonprofits that constructed new affordable housing, becoming landlords themselves. Ansfield prefers what they see as sweat equity’s “vision of a Bronx without landlords” over the CDC model, which “enshrined private property.” This downplays the fact that both efforts made ready use of long-standing ideals of individual property ownership—popular for generations in the US and reinvigorated in an era of rising neoliberalism—but did so in the name of communal caretaking for neighborhoods and shared community life. Both had their successes and failures, and both offer useful resources—as does the outright public ownership of housing.

If there’s one clear lesson we can draw from this history, it’s that we need to reimagine the particular form of private property that underpins urban life in the United States. This system is based on what the urbanist Jane Jacobs called a “monstrous” public-private hybrid, one that mobilizes social divides to propel gain here or to fix neglect and devastation there. Learning from the Bronx organizers and residents who put cooperative, participatory ideals to work—undoing the incentive to cull profit from destruction everywhere—is as good a place as any to start.