When one reaches a certain age, the need and pricing of insurance becomes much more important to affordability and daily concerns. Bench Ansfield's Born in Flames: The Business or Arson and the Remaking of the American City excoriates the greed and wolves overseeing sheep nature of fire insurance. The post war years saw the birth and explosive growth of the suburbs in American life, lowering the capabilities and funding of cities to the point where insurance companies joined the flight.

Ansfield's main focus is on the Bronx where landlords or their hired pawns managed to burn 20 % of the boroughs available housing. The governmental response to the insurance vacuum was the implementation of Fair Access to Insurance Requirements that did not have the same level of criteria or even application, causing some landlord to be able to insure beyond their property's actual value.

The book traces these political and company changes, showing how insurance companies and their representatives were well placed to control much of the laws for longer than anyone should be comfortable. But Ansfield also shows the resident side of this, the ones burned out of home, sometimes multiple times. In the eye opening introduction, Ansfield uses the found object artwork of Roberto Ramirez painting of burning brick as the entry point to the concerns and psychological toll of always needing to be ready to leave at too loud sounds or the smell of gasoline.

Recommended to readers of true crime, life in American Cities and myth busting.

"Born in Flames" is an eye-opening work that focuses the reader's attention on one of the most devastated pieces of real estate in the United States in the 1970s. The author, Bench Ansfield, argues convincingly that the idea that tenants chose to employ arson to destroy their apartments, whether by accident or choice, is not only erroneous but distracts us from the confluence of factors that did result in the idea that the 'Bronx is burning.' In reality, it was a combination of insurance companies entering territories that were previously deemed uninsurable for a variety of often racist reasons yet were unwilling to engage in investigations of arson and property damage that was easier to write off than spend money and resources probing the causes of, landlords who took advantage of cheap distressed properties that insurance covered for significantly more than they were worth, and local criminal networks that included landlords, tenants, police, fire department personnel, insurance adjusters, and numerous others that greased the wheels of payment schemes that paid off to the tune of tens of millions. It was only through a combination of local community efforts that brought continued attention to the distress of the Bronx and insurance companies finally beginning to reevaluate their actions and losses that the acts of arson finally started to abate. Local, state, and national attention then brought in money that helped rebuild much of the destroyed buildings throughout the Bronx over the following decades but the systemic issues that led to these arsons were never truly addressed as crony capitalist motivations, profit-seeking insurance companies, and policies based on racist foundations continue to have an outsized impact in the twenty-first century in the form of subprime mortgages and climate change, which have continued to devastate the ability of so many who simply seek affordable shelter yet cannot escape the ravages of greed and mother nature.