The Baffler | J Conzo
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.