Ring of Fire

Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield. W.W. Norton, 368 pages. 2025.

Before sunrise one August morning in 1976, Adrian “Popo” Vega doused a vacant apartment in gasoline. He stood back and struck a match. When the flame hit the fumes, he was nearly blown out of a nearby window. The families who still lived in the dilapidated building on Belmont Avenue, in the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx, woke up with a start. Several watched Vega, whom they knew as their rent collector, scamper down the fire escape as they fled.

The tenants quickly identified Vega to police, and he confessed to being a “torch”: his boss Carmine Lanni, the building’s landlord, had hired him to burn multiple properties. Lanni had bought the one on Belmont Avenue for just $5,000; his insurance policy was worth $250,000. Vega agreed to wear a wire. Soon, police caught Lanni contracting Vega to commit arson again. The Bronx County district attorney subsequently linked him to a ring of six other landlords who together owned fifty buildings and set fire to at least seventeen. Lanni was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Meanwhile, the Bronx continued to burn.

At a moment when prices in the borough are surging, it’s almost impossible to imagine an era when it was more profitable for landlords to torch their buildings than rent them out. Yet throughout the 1970s, an arson wave swept the Bronx and other disinvested areas nationwide. Some 20 percent of homes in the borough were burned or abandoned. Families were displaced en masse. While the inferno is often conflated with the previous decade’s racial uprisings and blamed on the buildings’ black and brown tenants, in reality, it was frequently the work of the buildings’ owners. They were incentivized by a novel state-sponsored insurance program, whose lax oversight allowed them to liquidate their properties for inflated payouts, as historian Bench Ansfield recounts in an outstanding new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City.

As an origin point for the present urban crisis, the arson wave is both fitting and misunderstood. Ansfield reveals that the intentional blazes were, in large part, a symptom of a shifting landscape of urban governance, one increasingly influenced by the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors. These industries engineered ways to offload racialized property risks onto the public. The resulting firestorm had lasting consequences: it helped make way for today’s highly financialized, boom-and-bust real estate cycles and the dire housing instability that they have yielded for working people.

Born in Flames picks up in the 1960s, when the present form of racial capitalism took shape, according to Ansfield. With massive civil rights rebellions shaking cities like Newark, Detroit, and Los Angeles, insurance companies quaked and tallied up their losses. Faced with deindustrialization and white flight, industry titans like Aetna had already redlined these cities, withdrawing coverage from their “blighted” black and brown neighborhoods. But the riots threatened even the zones they still insured.

Under pressure from the industry, the federal government stepped in to protect private property and the interests of capital in “riot-prone” areas. In 1968, Congress enshrined two solutions in law: One created a federally supported reinsurance program—essentially, insurance for insurers. The other formed a public-private partnership, the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plan. Each state would have its own high-risk insurance pool. Private companies would be required to participate, but their losses would be distributed and backstopped.

Lawmakers sold FAIR plans as a form of civil-rights redress intended to eliminate insurance redlining. It didn’t work out that way. “In neighborhoods that the FAIR plans were designed to assist, the impact was, in many cases, nothing short of cataclysmic,” Ansfield writes. Far from preventing redlining, they enabled private insurers to hasten their exit from the inner city. In a process that Ansfield dubs “brownlining,” the plans offered what was, in effect, subprime insurance: high-cost, low-quality coverage of last resort. Worst of all, though, FAIR plans ignited the arson wave. They launched at a time when New York City was suffering a crushing fiscal crisis. Real estate was declining in profitability, and landlords were abandoning rental units by the tens of thousands. FAIR plans provided them with high-value insurance for low-value buildings. This “insurance gap,” as Ansfield calls it, meant that properties were worth more to owners as smoldering ruins. One 1978 report shows that the larger the gap was, the greater the damage—not just in the Bronx but from Maryland to Illinois to Pennsylvania.

Slumlords like Lanni, who was known to tool around the South Bronx in a pink Cadillac, may make satisfying villains. But the villainy, Ansfield argues, courses through the bloodstream of American capitalism. The insurance industry was not just negligent but collusive. Underwriting departments of state FAIR plans upheld few actuarial standards. When buildings burned, they quickly paid out policies, often without investigation. By 1977, New York’s FAIR plan had endured losses of $68.5 million, a sum that would have ruined any private company. But because the losses were shared, they did not eat into the bottom line. In fact, the companies were happy to pass them on to consumers through premium hikes.

Besides which, insurers had by then discovered greater means of profit. The advent of FAIR plans coincided with the financialization of the American economy writ large, and an increasing share of the industry’s earnings came not from underwriting but from investing customer premiums into money markets. Soon, global interests got in on the action. Lloyd’s of London and other unregulated subprime insurers, many tied to shadowy networks of financiers, returned to places like the Bronx and undercut FAIR plan prices. Through one Lloyd’s syndicate, a single Miami underwriter issued policies for thousands of properties, sold by a Bronx brokerage and backed by a Rio de Janeiro reinsurance firm, covering several of the most predatory South Bronx arson rings. Landlords bought up buildings for prices as low as $2,500 and insured them for up to $500,000. The syndicate collapsed in scandal after the Brazilian company connected its mounting losses to reports of rampant landlord arson and insurance fraud. In the end, the damage amounted to a headline-making $45 million loss for Lloyd’s. The company pushed off, once again, from American shores.

A strength of Born in Flames is the care and finesse with which Ansfield treats the lives that the fires scorched—much as Robert Caro, in The Power Broker, tended to Bronx residents whose worlds were run through by reckless mid-century highway construction. The new financialized system of insurance left the borough’s predominantly black and brown families surrounded by rubble, casualties of capitalist extraction. Even before the fires, the withdrawal of private property insurers influenced the behavior of landlords, who cut back on maintenance, leaving tenants to suffer leaky roofs, mold, lack of heat and hot water—and sometimes worse.

When the arsons began, tenants were wracked with fear of the next inferno. Parents in the South Bronx, where the fires were concentrated, put their children to bed fully dressed in case they had to flee. One woman recalls awakening at night and fighting through a cloud of “heat and black smoke” to escape with her children, who required oxygen treatment on the sidewalk. Many tenants were repeatedly displaced. A Senate investigation found that “some victims report a history of three, four, or more burnouts, each of them accompanied by fright, dislocation, and related financial stress.” Over the course of a decade, some half a million people were driven from their homes.

Meanwhile, lawmakers and landlords blamed the fires on tenants themselves. “The cruel irony was that to survive the fires was to become their scapegoat,” Ansfield writes. At times, these parties alleged that the arsons were the work of welfare recipients seeking a relocation subsidy or a bump up on the public housing waiting list. More often, they chalked the blazes up to “social pathology.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, misguided theorist of the black family and eventual New York senator, was a leading proponent of this line of reasoning. “The psychiatric interpretation of fire-setting is complex,” Moynihan sagely explained to President Richard Nixon in 1970, “but it relates to the types of personalities which slums produce.”

In truth, stopping the fires required the state to close the insurance gap, Ansfield writes. But again and again, those in government failed to take action. So the borough’s tenants got organized, often alongside clergy members, in order to draw officials’ attention to the causes of the advancing flames. In time, they gained the ear of Bronx County District Attorney Mario Merola, a cinematic dog-with-a-bone figure who declared all-out war on arson and began prosecuting the offense as an economic crime.

Perhaps it should be no surprise, however, that what finally tipped the scales was a mostly unrelated media spectacle. During New York City’s twenty-five-hour blackout in July 1977, thousands of unemployed and austerity-stricken residents took to the streets, looting and burning properties across the boroughs. Mayor Abe Beame formed the Arson Task Force days later. By the end of the month, the Senate had introduced an anti-arson bill. That October, President Jimmy Carter visited Charlotte Street, an especially devastated stretch of the South Bronx. The New York FAIR plan instituted tighter underwriting standards and more rigorous fire investigations. Before long, Aetna and others rolled out anti-arson publicity campaigns of their own. Burning down buildings stopped being profitable.

Born in Flames reads most poignantly as a forgotten chapter in America’s perpetual state of urban crisis. Redlining, financialization, and subprime lending will be familiar to even casual observers of real estate. But few know how these processes have applied to property insurance. Ansfield’s account is rigorous and far more gripping than a book about underwriting, adapted from a doctoral dissertation, ought to be. The book’s feckless rings of white-collar crooks give it a touch of true-crime intrigue, and its confrontations between underdog tenants and the industry help explain our present residential calamity.

Capital may have won the political battles that exploded in the 1970s, but housing remains contested. Then as now, Ansfield makes clear, tenants not only organized against abuses but sought to intervene directly. Among the book’s most intriguing accounts is of sweat equity, a DIY movement to reclaim derelict properties for common use, even as the fires still raged. Most famously, the People’s Development Corporation renovated an abandoned building in the South Bronx’s Morrisania neighborhood and ran it collectively, without a landlord. President Carter heaped praise on their efforts during his 1977 visit. Was he aware that the group proposed transforming the whole area into a Maoist urban village?

Over time, such radical efforts gave way to the market-oriented approach of community development corporations, a product of the federal War on Poverty. Backed by the Ford Foundation, these nonprofits transformed affordable housing into tax shelters for Wall Street investors, a means of incentivizing them to dump capital back into neglected neighborhoods like those in the Bronx. Eventually, dubious Reaganite programs like the low-income housing tax credit formalized the model, often minting slumlords while profiting financiers. Community development corporations, Ansfield writes, “played a key role in the financialization of affordable housing development.”

The system dominated by finance, insurance, and real estate is stronger today than ever. In the twenty-first century, it gave us the foreclosure crisis in many of the same neighborhoods scorched by arson. And the FAIR plan continues to indemnify capital from an emergent set of risks. Its share of policyholders rose 29 percent between 2018 and 2021, as climate disasters like floods and wildfires have only increased in frequency and severity. Property owners in coastal areas of Long Island and Florida increasingly rely on it. In “firebelt” suburbs like Malibu, which private insurers now refuse to cover, the FAIR plan insures second homes owned by “wealthy pyrophiles,” as the author Mike Davis once called them. When thousands of homes burned in the Pacific Palisades in January, FAIR claims reached into the tens of billions of dollars, far more than the state-run insurer had on hand. In this way, corporate elites continue to push private risk onto the public, as they did with inner-city risks fifty years ago.

In many cities, these industries, through their stranglehold on government, are still seeding residential instability for working communities of color. “The arson wave was, in a sense, a free-market slum-clearance program,” Ansfield writes. It swept the ground for today’s inexorable gentrification process. Like many formerly disinvested districts across America, the Bronx has undergone a process of revalorization as investors seek new markets. Gleaming luxury buildings brimming with “hotel-level amenities, access to premium services, and smart-home technology” reflect off the Harlem River.

At the same time, residents face some of the highest displacement pressures in the city, and eviction rates are twice those of other boroughs. Ruin porn has become part of the South Bronx’s new brand. In 2015, Ansfield notes, Somerset Partners hosted a “Bronx is Burning” art party, featuring celebrity attendees mingling amid bullet-riddled cars and trash-can fires, to promote a $400 million real estate project. A billboard looming above the Bruckner Expressway announced: “South Bronx—Piano District. Luxury Waterfront Living. World-Class Dining, Fashion, Art + Architecture. Coming Soon.” The developer promised to turn the South Bronx into the next SoHo. Indeed, the borough’s future may be prosperous. But who will be included?