Overview

""Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!"" Supposedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, the phrase encapsulated an entire chaotic era in this nation's history. Across the 1970s, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, leveling poor communities of color. However, as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the majority of those fires weren't set by residents-as is usually assumed-but by landlords seeking insurance payouts. Ansfield introduces the term ""brownlining"" for the subprime insurance practices imposed by the federal government and insurance industry after 1968, and shows why, with buildings worth more dead than alive, landlords turned to the torch. In an expansive narrative stretching from the Bronx to Britain to Brazil, Ansfield tracks the flows of money that signaled the arrival of our financialized age. From the ashes arose the modern tenant movement and the fight for housing justice amid a new era of housing insecurity.

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9781324093510

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Reviews

Bench Ansfield exposes how the insurance industry, along with the federal government, collaborated and knowingly pushed my Bronx community further into poverty, despair, housing insecurity, and even death. . . . Having lived through the fires, I commend Ansfield's dedication to excavating the truth behind systemic racism. I am profoundly grateful to them for redeeming the generations that suffered through the firestorm.--Vivian Vázquez Irizarry, director of Decade of Fire A young historian's superlative debut...this excellent book delivers the truth about 'the burning years.-- ""Kirkus Reviews (starred)"" Racial inequality persists because it was insured. In this beautifully written work, Bench Ansfield is the first to uncover crucial links between the 1970s wave of urban arson and the subsequent rise of finance in the United States. One of the very few essential books on the recent history of racial capitalism in the United States, and a revelatory and unusually creative history of race and risk.--Jonathan Levy, author of Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States This outstanding book will change everything that we think we know about what happened to American cities in the late twentieth century. A masterpiece of history.--Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership Born in Flames tells a gripping story of how our cities came to be--by way of power, capital, and fire. . . . This book does what so many neglect, introducing the reader to not just the policies and power brokers, but also to the regular people of the Bronx, who revolted against the profiteers who conspired to burn their homes.--Tara Raghuveer, founding director, Tenant Union Federation and KC Tenants Reading like a detective novel, Born in Flames is a devastating account of how the global insurance industry, property owners, and the federal government were the real arsonists, turning the 'creative destruction' of black and brown neighborhoods into profit and spectacle. By seeing the world through the Bronx, Bench Ansfield upends conventional narratives of the 1970s, capitalism's global crisis, protest politics, even the origins of hip-hop. Destined to become a classic.--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class Born in Flames is a searing and incisive exploration of the intersection of race, capitalism, and urban devastation in the late 20th century. Bench Ansfield masterfully unearths the hidden histories of landlord arson and the financialization of urban space, illuminating how racial capitalism set fire to American cities. Challenging conventional narratives of urban decline, Ansfield offers a profound analysis of the way policies meant to rectify inequalities instead deepened them, and how marginalized communities fought back against the destruction. A vital contribution to understanding how the fires of the past continue to shape the injustices of the present.--Elizabeth Hinton, author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960 Born in Flames shatters the myth that Bronx residents burned their own neighborhoods in the 1970s. Bench Ansfield reveals how a '60s-era privatized fire insurance reform policy-- redlining in disguise--fueled mass-scale landlord abandonment and arson for profit during a decade of financial crisis, not just in the Bronx but nationwide. Amid the devastation, residents led one of the largest urban rebuilding efforts in U.S. history. Elegantly written and deeply researched, this groundbreaking history lays bare the roots of today's housing crisis.""--Johanna Fernández, author of The Young Lords: A Radical History Bench Ansfield has written an extraordinary history of the American city in the late twentieth century. Beautifully written and drawing on meticulous archival work, Born in Flames illuminates the economic and social logic that has led to the emergencies of our time.--Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

Author Information

Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. Ansfield holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians. They live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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