NIMBYism is inherently reactionary

And this history of Chris Rufo is a reminder that he understands what way too many people on the broad left do not:

Rufo argued, in a flurry of essays, that homelessness was not economic but personal in nature, that it was driven not by skyrocketing rents but instead something harder to quantify: “disaffiliation” — alienated people dropping out of mainstream society. Progressives, he said, were not equipped to handle the crisis because they were blinded by ideology, an excess of misguided compassion. The solution, in his view, was not housing but stricter enforcement of laws.

To people who studied homelessness and advocated for homeless people, Rufo’s arguments were riddled with non-sequiturs, factual errors and ahistorical claims. He brushed aside decades of research making the case that stabilizing people in homes before treating any addictions or mental illnesses yielded better results and was cheaper than arresting and jailing people or allowing them to cycle through emergency rooms. He rejected data showing that rates of homelessness corresponded closely to rising rents.

He pushed a narrative of social breakdown driving homelessness even though the crisis spiked in Washington state at a time when family stability was actually improving; divorce, domestic violence, and teenage pregnancy were all going down; more couples were getting married and more children were growing up in two-parent households. He said drug use drove homelessness even though — while addiction is a thread in many individual stories of homelessness — Washington lagged most of the country in the growth of opioid use.

He cited data on the chronically homeless, a particularly disabled subset of the homeless population, to make sweeping claims about homelessness at large. He cited Houston as a city where a law-and-order approach to homelessness had worked, even though Houston had in reality embraced the same “housing first” approach that Rufo panned. (The reason Houston’s “housing first” efforts succeeded, according to one study by housing advocates: Unlike expensive West Coast cities, Houston had “abundant, low-cost housing.”)

And he ignored the fact that many of his proposals were already a reality in Seattle — regular “sweeps” of encampments and arrests of homeless people — to little effect. The number of homeless people Seattle police booked into jail had been rising steadily for years and, by 2018, one in five jail bookings were for people who were homeless, according to an analysis by Crosscut.

Of course, more housing abundance means fewer homeless people, but that doesn’t matter when fascism is the end as well as the means!

For those who didn’t know this, he also ended his run for electoral office in Seattle in the most MAGA crybaby way possible:

In the aftermath, Rufo portrayed himself as a moderate who wanted “civil debate” but was caught off guard by the intensity of attacks from the left. It won him sympathetic coverage from Seattle’s conservative TV and radio commentators.

Never trust anyone who calls themselves “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” and that goes triple if they’re trying to get elected in a blue jurisdiction.