When he was a teenager, Joe Willis recalled, he started doing odd jobs for his Philadelphia landlord. He’d paint an apartment, wash a car, empty trash cans. But the work wasn’t frequent enough to make rent, and he soon fell behind. That’s when his landlord offered him a different job to erase the balance: set fire to a vacant apartment.
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This arrangement was not unusual in the 1970s. Willis, who used an alias to share his story, was a “torch” — a hired hand that slumlords contracted to set their neglected properties ablaze and collect property insurance policies worth much more than the buildings themselves. Though this wave of arson is most associated with the Bronx, where an estimated 250,000 people lost their homes, it reshaped cities across America, as Temple University professor Bench Ansfield documents in their new book, “Born in Flames.”
The book, out Tuesday, delves into the “business” of arson from 1968 until the early 1980s. Ansfield’s research demonstrates how insurers, not just landlords, contributed to the high rates of arson in poorer, predominantly Black city neighborhoods. White flight to the suburbs, overblown panic over 1960s riots and redlining converged to create a situation where insurers had effectively abandoned these areas.
In 1968, the federal government responded with a law establishing the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements program. States oversaw their own FAIR plans, but private insurers paid into the financial pool in exchange for federal riot reinsurance. While FAIR was designed to ensure all neighborhoods, regardless of income or demographics, had protection, in practice, the plans covered very little and came at a high cost — making them appealing to negligent landlords with ample cash reserves. Negligent insurers, in turn, rarely investigated the suspicious claims. Through a complex network of reinsurance policies, they were able to diffuse or delay their financial responsibilities for years at a time.
“I fell down this rabbit hole of insurance and kind of haven’t emerged since,” Ansfield said. “It’s something that is so boring, so banal. It’s everywhere. Nobody wants to think about it anymore than they absolutely have to. I certainly didn’t. And yet because of that, because it was just hiding in plain sight, I started to see it cropping up in all these different places.”
The scope of the arson problem is hard to relate through statistics, which Ansfield writes were “notoriously unreliable and inconsistent throughout the 1970s.” But the crime was a frequent topic in the day’s news and pop culture. The New York Times reported that arson was a billion-dollar “growth industry” by 1980, costing an annual $1.5 billion in direct property loss and $15 billion in total financial loss, which factored in lost jobs, income and housing opportunity. Arson was such a common part of city life in the 1970s that it bled into disco hits like “Disco Inferno” by the Trammps, a Philly-based quintet.
“If you think that arson, this nation’s fastest growing crime, is no concern of yours — think again,” the Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 1978. “Arson for profit is escalating at a rate that has helped inflate both property taxes and insurance costs to record highs. And most experts are certain that there is much more arson going on than anyone can imagine.”
It was ultimately residents, Ansfield argues, that stemmed the tide of arson. Community groups organized to raise awareness, patrol the neighborhood and pressure state and local officials into action. Kensington Action Now, for instance, ran a hotline and used computerized algorithms developed in Boston and the Bronx to identify arson-prone buildings, which they watched at night for torches. By 1982, federal lawmakers had reclassified arson as a Part I crime, requiring monthly reporting to the FBI.
That’s not to say the issues outlined in “Born in Flames” are a thing of the past. Ansfield points to the fire that burned the Admiral Court apartment complex in West Philadelphia in June. Its longtime landlord Phil Pulley had evicted all tenants in 2018 for a sale that fell apart; he later took out a $25 million mortgage on the property and another vacant complex, which he defaulted on. While investigators have not named a suspect, they have classified the blaze as an arson.
Understanding the conditions that led to the 1970s arson problem, Ansfield said, can help readers make better sense of ongoing housing instability and the volatile real estate market.
“This is a history of people fighting for better housing, fighting against really intense odds for more stable, safer and often cheaper housing,” Ansfield said. “And there’s a lot to learn in terms of what tenants and renters are facing today from this moment in 1970s and ’80s.”
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
