Why the Bronx Burned in the 1970s
August 4, 2017 8:28 AM   Subscribe

It was game two of the 1977 World Series, a chilly, blustery October night in the South Bronx. The Yanks were already down 2-0 in the bottom of the first inning when ABC’s aerial camera panned a few blocks over from Yankee Stadium to give the world its first live glimpse of a real Bronx Cookout. “There it is, ladies and gentlemen,” Howard Cosell intoned. “The Bronx is burning.”
Cosell's quote is a myth, but the game was real, as were the fires. It wasn't due to riots or hoodlums, but a failed attempt to streamline NYFD.

The RAND Corporation has a different recollection of its history with the Fire Department of the City of New York. The Rand Fire Project began in 1968 (preview of paywalled article), with a simulation model of fire department operations (PDF) in 1970. The reasons to pursue this effort were two-fold: a Utopian idea of optimized public services, and a very real issue of increased fires.
The Bronx lost more than 97 percent of its buildings to fire and abandonment between 1970 and 1980, according to census data. In 1976, arson rates hit a record high with 13,752 recorded arsons. Mayor John Lindsay seemed to think arsons were getting so bad that he set up CANS, the Community and News Service, as a way to provide shelter, food, money and clothes for the people affected by these fires.
The problem of increased fires in New York City was real, as was the problem with funding and sending out fire fighters. It turns out that the fires kept burning in The Bronx because of a misguided data-driven approach to improving firefighting efficiency.
While this is shocking, it’s not surprising. Many bad urban planning decisions at the time leaned heavily on improperly collected data, which politician used to clear slums in favor of housing projects or funnel freeways through historic neighborhoods.
FiveThirtyEight talked with Joe Flood about Why The Bronx Really Burned in 2015 in a podcast episode of What's The Point. In the early 1970s, arson wasn't the main source of these fires, but a mix of poverty, substance abuse, family dysfunction and an overcrowded, aging and poorly maintained housing stock operated by slum lords which created conditions in which the fires started. But then an attempt to more efficiently allocate resources, based a Sim City-like modeling of the city, carried back to city management from the data management efforts of World War II, lead to those fires burning longer. High faith in data (and people faking or tweaking the data) lead to bad decisions, which lead to a burning city.

The FDNY was put in a similarly tough spot decades later, when they had to respond to Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts in 2011, but they tried to avoid the mistakes of the seventies. Despite getting another complex, multi-million-dollar computer modeling system,
... the department ultimately decided to ignore the complicated algorithms, feedback loops, and assumption testing of the expensive modeling system in favor of a much simpler arithmetic: It took three years of response-time data, which tracks which fire companies are due first, second, and third on the scene of a given emergency, and simply calculated what would happen if one of those companies was closed.
...
By looking at the companies that went on the fewest runs and would produce the smallest increase in predicted response time, the department came up with a list of potential closings and sent it out for high-level chiefs and borough commanders to critique, based on their own experience and knowledge of more intangible factors. When the data didn’t reflect how important a company truly was (because it was near, say, a large hospital or natural gas tanks, or had good access to a highway like the Cross Bronx) the company was taken off the list and replaced with a less vital unit.
There is no easy fix, and improvements are more likely to come in small steps. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it usually rhymes."

More from Joe Flood: Numbers and Narrative, Flood's own podcast, and The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities (Goodreads; Amazon), Joe's book on this topic.
posted by filthy light thief (13 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
Okay so I'm about to go diving through these links, but I always thought that there wasn't any particular mystery behind the fires in the Bronx: that it was just that landlords were financially incentivized to burn down their own buildings, so they burned down their own buildings (never mind how many people they killed doing it). This is, obviously, the narrative that Flood is trying to counter.

The burnings in the Bronx have been on a lot of peoples' minds here in the Bay Area, since we also have a situation — a different situation, of course — where landlords are financially incentivized to burn down their own buildings. And so for example whereas building fires have been going down throughout most of San Francisco, where building fires have been going down citywide, but going up in the neighborhoods where rents are going up most rapidly and where there still exist a significant fraction of people in rent-controlled units (most notably in the Tenderloin and the Mission).

The question I have with Flood's narrative — misallocated fire department resources, and so forth — is the question of whether and when building fires get classified as arson. Is this addressed in his book? This is particularly on my mind because here in West Oakland there was recently a fire — killed three people — in a transitional housing facility where the politically connected landlord was attempting to evict the non-profit that managed the transitional housing program there.

According to the Oakland fire department, this fire was sparked off by an unattended candle left by one of the tenants; according to people in the neighborhood, the landlord — who's involved in business deals with Lynette McElhaney, the famously corrupt city council member who represents West Oakland — was allowed to send a cleanup crew into the building four hours after the fire was out.

Basically the question I'm asking, and the one that I'm hoping is answered in Flood's book, is whether Flood is discussing the arson rate in the Bronx, or if he's instead discussing the rate of fires officially declared arson in the Bronx. The two are different; when wealthy, connected people burn down buildings for profit, the fires are generally less likely to be declared arson than other sorts of fires are.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:00 AM on August 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


Joe Flood's book is essential.
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:12 AM on August 4, 2017


You Can't Tip a Buick, that's an interesting question. From what I've read online and heard in the podcast, he doesn't get into that. I was trying to skim the book on Google books preview, but I wasn't able to read much before losing access to most of it ("no preview available for this page"). Searching for "arson rate," I see this clip: "Because of steep cuts in the number of fire marshals in the early 1970s, they were unable to investigate as many fires as in previous years, and the official arson rates are almost certainly too low from 1972 to 1976."

There are other references to arson rates, but I can't see enough to quote the passages well enough.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:13 AM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


The key blunder, as I recall, was that RAND built their response-time model on the time a fire company left their station in response to an alarm, rather than the time it arrived at the scene of a fire. They essentially hand-waved away NYC traffic, which really isn't something you can do that to, and in the sensitively-dependent way of these things, it meant that the model was useless.

But the larger point that Flood makes, and that I've cited heavily and relied upon in my own writing, is that the model could have been of the utmost fidelity to reality and it wouldn't have changed a thing, because that model was much less important to the disposition of FDNY stations than community pressure (i.e. the demand of wealthy neighborhoods for more coverage, even though they had far fewer fires) and the department's internal politics. It's a signal lesson that the advocates of data-driven urbanism still haven't quite wrapped their heads around, all these years later.
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:18 AM on August 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


Interesting points, thanks Adam!

I heard about this topic after talking with a fellow transportation planner about the problems with relying on travel demand modeling. In short, we've dumped billions of dollars into understanding and forecasting traffic decades into the future, but possibly half of the major city-level modeling efforts have been for naught, as congestion and delays increase, despite all this money invested into understanding the future, which should inform us of how to change things now to improve future traffic flows (and air quality). There are so many variables and factors that can change, and so many ways that the future can change and ruin all your clean, orderly, logical assumptions. It made me something of a Big Data/modeling cynic, at least in this field.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:30 AM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


(Oh, and the models were more "SimCity-like" than many folks discussing them seem to realize, as both RAND's approach to urban data modeling and the original SimCity are explicitly indebted to the formulae worked out in Jay Forrester's pathbreaking 1969 book Urban Dynamics.)
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:31 AM on August 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


I did not expect to see an article like this in the New York Post.
posted by rikschell at 10:28 AM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


Hoodlums did not burn The Bronx. The bureaucrats did.

Follow the money. Always.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:19 PM on August 4, 2017


If you don't feel like watching the whole game, this video has the snippets of the World Series broadcast in which they pan over to the fire and comment on it. Of course, without the famous line.
posted by Elly Vortex at 12:24 PM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well, I hope you all are happy. Joe Flood's book's been ordered. (Although I did get a used copy. Is that okay?)
posted by Samizdata at 12:43 PM on August 4, 2017


Driving the Cross Bronx in the 70s was a depressing experience - burned out buildings above, abandoned (and also frequently burned) cars below. It was really easy to believe the entire city would end up like that, especially when the "Ford to City: Drop Dead" headline came out. I was glad to see how much of the Bronx has recovered although now I worry gentrification is behind it.
posted by tommasz at 3:27 PM on August 4, 2017


Arson is quite difficult to prove, at least in NC, as a set checklist of factors has to determined before a person/s/entity can be prosecuted for arson. It's even more difficult to get the firesetter locked up. FDNY never should have relied on bullshit data; it's something I wonder a lot about as neighboring departments work towards accreditation and are creating a lot of these datasets and local governments work to close fire stations or have an apparatus run with 3 instead of 4, tying our hands when we arrive on the fireground. Manpower and a good water system are what keep people safe, but governing bodies don't want to pay to have the number of firefighters they should (nor do they pay us enough as individual worker bees, but that's beside the point) or to upgrade existing (and sometimes non-existent) water supplies.

I could backseat IC a lot of fireground incidents all day, but by no means should a clean up crew be allowed to touch a scene with a fatality until the SBI and other agencies handled their investigations. That's a mighty big no-no. That's litigation waiting to happen,
posted by sara is disenchanted at 3:50 PM on August 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


It all started in 1741...
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:56 PM on August 4, 2017


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