Gabriella’s Reviews > Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City > Status Update

“By the mid-1970s, the CDC model had proven that it could grow well in the arid soil of austerity…CDCs thrived because they cross-fertilized the neighborhood-based, community-control impulses of the War on Poverty with market-oriented economic development…it departed from its forebears by replacing poverty with property as its center of gravity, [routing] community action through the property relation…”

“When CDCs eclipsed sweat equity in the late 1970s, funded…by insurance companies, they became the primary agents of affordable housing construction...The story of their ascendance is the story of financialization…before the subprime lending of the 1990s and 2000s, the world of finance courted the affordable housing sector in search of tax shelters and good PR. The CDC was a crucial conduit in that process.”

“As one industry insider put it…’The insurance mechanism is being made the dumping ground for…unsolved social problems’ [Although] such disavowals sprang from rank self-interest…property insurance would never rectify the violence of racial capitalism; insurance serves only one master, and that master is property itself…the presence of insurance does not in turn guarantee better housing conditions.”

“Though tenant organizing would play a pivotal role in suppressing the arson wave, it could not singlehandedly keep out a threat that was built into the financial foundations of the Bronx’s brownlined neighborhoods…Stopping arson meant diminishing its profitability, and under racial capitalism, that was a role only state and corporate actors could perform. But it took tenants to force their hand.”

“The devastated landscape of the 1970s Bronx heralded the triumph of the FIRE industries…fire insurance was unyoked from fire safety [and] fire safety entered into a paradoxical relationship with the financial world: as the insurance and financial firms of Wall Street expanded their reach, a wave of incendiary fires erupted across the Bronx.”

“The Bronx is not typically imagined as a site of financialization. In the popular imagination, the rise of finance took place under the fluorescent lights of Wall Street trading floors, in the corner offices of coked-up junk bond traders…[but] financialization was not just in lower Manhattan or the City of London; it was also in Morrisania…More precisely, it could be found in the uneven flows between them.”

“‘…Until the 1960s…insurance companies made money on underwriting; investments were merely a way to protect capital and surplus from inflation.’ Financialization meant the bow of the economy was pointed toward capital markets…For insurers, the underwriting function that had historically determined company profits became merely a means of raising capital—through premiums—for investment.”

“Across the 1970s, the policies sold by the NYPIUA came to have less and less of a direct relationship with the safety and well-being of their corresponding properties. In the growing space between the building and the policy, between the property and its protection, between the thing and the abstraction dwelled the tenants of the Bronx, stranded in the brownlined American city.”

“…histories of the Bronx betray…an anguished wistfulness for “the way it was”…[Nostalgic magazines and books] imagine a Bronx of limitless upward mobility…especially for Jewish residents, who made up 49% of the borough in 1930…a move up to the Bronx brought not only a change in address but a shift in one’s race and class coordinates…the borough was a way station on the road to whiteness.”

“..the 1970s arson wave..shape[d] lives. Out of its embers was forged the metropolis we know today: one defined by volcanic real estate booms, economy-cratering busts, + an ongoing decline 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 homelessness, eviction, + foreclosure have become defining aspects of urban life.”