BORN IN FLAMES:

During the 1970s, a wave of arson coursed through cities across the United States, destroying large portions of neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Popular memory confuses the arson wave with the 1960s uprisings. Yet these fires were lit not for protest, but for profit, most of which flowed into the aptly named FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate. Born in Flames reveals a view of financialization from the ground up: how it was felt, contested, and transfigured by those far from the fray of Wall Street.

While telling a national and global story, the book centers on the Bronx, known in these years as the “arson capital of the world.” Although physical science would have it that fire requires only oxygen, heat, and fuel to ignite, the crucial ingredient during the 1970s was government-sponsored fire insurance, initiated by federal fiat in the wake of the 1960s uprisings. The most destructive arsons in these years were performed for profit, which accumulated in the bank accounts of absentee landlords in the form of insurance payouts. Tens of thousands of housing units were lost between 1968 and the early 1980s. The firestorm only came to an end because those whose homes lay in its path built up their tenant power and brought it to bear upon their legislators, landlords, and lenders.

The torching of vast swaths of the American city may strike some as a bizarre event in the distant past. Yet this is very much a history of the present. Long neglected by historians, the arson wave lays bare late-twentieth century shifts in political economy that shape our here and now. Deep within the arson wave was forged the metropolis we know: one defined by volcanic real estate booms, economy-cratering busts, and an unrelenting downswing in housing stability. The world in which a solidly-built home could generate more value by ruination than habitation is the same world in which houselessness, eviction, and foreclosure have entered the daily grammar of urban life.