Born in Flames
The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
Born in Flames is a powerful retelling of the arson wave that overtook the South Bronx in the 1970s. Bench Ansfield offers a corrective history by providing an alternative to the well-worn narrative of “racial pathology” that left “the vague impression that Bronxites burned down their own borough” in the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s. Rather than indulging a story of racial pathology, Ansfield forcefully argues that the Bronx arson wave of the 1970s was a foreseeable if regrettable conclusion to the logics of racial capitalism that define what they call the American finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries.
Running parallel to the well-known history of mortgage redlining, Ansfield argues, was the practice of insurance redlining. Following the riots of the 1960s, insurers in cities across the United States began either to offer subpar, single-line coverages or to withdraw completely from areas deemed “riot-prone.” Riot-proneness, however, was merely a proxy for race, meaning that communities of color were disproportionately impacted by the withdrawal of insurers from urban areas. In a stark illustration, Ansfield recounts how “on August 19, 1967, Philadelphians awoke to discover that their city’s insurance had been canceled. That morning, the Inquirer reported that the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA), the largest landlord in Pennsylvania, had found itself suddenly uninsured.”
To address the lack of coverage, states created fair access to insurance requirements plans. FAIR plans (which still exist) were administered by “public-private insurance companies,” explains Ansfield, companies that were “backed by the federal government and overseen by individual states.” The plans provided poorer coverage at higher rates to homeowners in high-risk insurance pools, including those living in “riot-prone” areas. To give insurers an incentive to participate in these high-risk pools, the federal government offered FAIR plans reinsurance, which is essentially insurance for the insurance company. This helped to diffuse financial risk from insurance losses across space and time.
