Government's laws and regulations are not contracts. People don't enter them voluntarily and they are not known ahead of time — it's simply the will of the voting majority, or worse, imposed on everybody with violence.
Also, freedom to do whatever you want in your property is not how most of the world operates, if you share a building with others in most countries you have to abide to certain rules. These rules are more commonly disrespected by short-term guests who don't have to care about long-term relationships with neighbours.
If it's not a nuisance, then no one would complain, but it eventually becomes a nuisance. As an anecdote: a month ago I stayed a few days (5-7) at a friend's place I was visiting who lives in Lisbon, just on his floor there are 4 AirBnBs (owned by the same person). Not only it was a nuisance with noise for most of the days I was there it was also a nuisance to have drunk British girls banging on your door at 02.00 in the night when they don't remember the fucking apartment they are supposedly going to. My friend mentioned it's not uncommon for that to happen, or to have a gag of people show up to a party in one of the apartments. Other people living in the building have complained to AirBnB, to the police, to the housing association, nothing really happens.
This is just one building, in one city suffering the bad sides of tourism, I can't imagine how many of these instances repeat throughout AirBnB-listed properties in similar places...
So enforce them, it's one five minute zero-interaction phone call to have a cop deal with a noise complaint. I can, and do, throw loud parties at my apartment, stumble through my hallways drunk, and host rowdy out of town friends and no one dares question my ability to live there.
Trying to enforce social norms by not allowing "certain kinds of people" to sleep there is grade-a bullshit. Trying to get outcome A by making a rule about B is unfair to everyone who is B but not A and A but not B. This kind of reasoning is why it's so hard to get multi-family housing approved. A nice suburb in my city forced the development of new desperately needed apartment complexes to be on the the border because "less desirable" people live in apartments.
"Just enforce them" is a non-solution, I mentioned that my anecdote included calling cops and bringing it up with AirBnB and housing association, the apartments are still listed, as they've been for 3 years. You can't just say "enforce them" and expect that magically it will happen, even less in a city where tourism has become a major economical backbone. The world is not that simple, these negative externalities can't be shoved under a rug when they start affecting a whole city's living population like is the case in Lisbon...
> Trying to enforce social norms by not allowing "certain kinds of people" to sleep there is grade-a bullshit. Trying to get outcome A by making a rule about B is unfair to everyone who is B but not A and A but not B. This kind of reasoning is why it's so hard to get multi-family housing approved. A nice suburb in my city forced the development of new desperately needed apartment complexes to be on the the border because "less desirable" people live in apartments.
Please, don't soapbox, the issue with AirBnBs in overcrowded touristic places is very, very different than whatever bullshit zoning laws happen in the USA, don't conflate those issues as they are not the same.
How is regulating airbnbs any different from zoning laws?