Wow. Is that a law most Californians support?
There is an inherent huge power imbalance between the landlord and the renter, where if the landlord ad-hoc decides to throw you out before you have a new place lined up, you might find yourself homeless. When people have such power over others, they often abuse that power in various ways, like asking for sexual favors, raising the rent cost exploitatively high at inopportune moments, or blackmailing the renter to keep quiet about violations, etc.
We as a society recognize that simply telling people "if you don't like the thing your landlord is asking of you in the middle of the night without warning, you are free to move out and become homeless until you find a new location" is not a humane and viable solution. Hence, we have laws for what can and can't be done.
The worst markets were the most regulated with the most "protections". The US was exceptionally bad. There are several checks (ie: credit check), wait time, deposit, papers, onboarding process, more wait time, bank balance checks, more papers to sign. etc... for a few months rental. And you'd think all these people will make for a better maintained property. Nope.
But have you considered that as you were traveling across different countries, you'd be biased towards seeing the problems that affect you (finding a new place to rent) and you'd not be seeing the problems that don't affect you (existing renters being abused)?
Traveling is not the same thing as moving.
Imagine you are a lone mother taking care of her kid, you are carpooling to work, and barely making ends meet. Then your landlord starts making some demands on you and starts hinting that he might throw you out otherwise. Is it realistic to say "The mother should just move out the next day, and find a new place for herself and her child, and find a new means of transportation to her job. If that new landlord abuses his power she should just move again the next day."
Your viewpoint isn't uncommon, but the last few hundred years of modern society has repeatedly demonstrated that if people have leverage over others in terms of their access to food, medicine and shelter, then that power will be abused. If companies could they'd be paying you in scrip, we had to outlaw it, not simply tell workers to find a non-scrip workplace.
Moving is very expensive. You have a deposit on the new rental. You have to pay for moving your stuff over to the new place. You might have to take time off work to search for a new rental. You probably have some overlapping lease time where you are paying double on rent.
Its also like 300,000 dollars to get a liquor license in L.A. which is the government essentially excluding all small business from starting a bar and playing favoritism to big corporations with the stated intention of safety/regulation.
Now for the problem: it takes many months to evict here, best case. As a result, we will never take a chance on a marginal tenant. No other decent landlord with whom I’ve spoken will either.
Unintended consequences are real, especially when owners are deprived of their property rights. You might think I’m conservative, but for the most part I’m a flaming liberal. ;-)
Perhaps future generations will look back on this period and see us as barbaric because of it.
If you ignore the Airbnb element — then on the surface this appears to be an issue of a landlord letting a property which was not fit for occupation. It is the landlords obligation, not the renters, to determine whether their property is fit for purpose. If they failed to do so, then the renter is protected from punitive actions (such as being evicted) for wanting these fixes made when they are discovered.
Seems reasonable to me.
And if the residence isn't fit for occupancy, then nobody should be living there, rent or no rent. While apparently legal, the dissonance required to argue "I won't pay rent because the home isn't fit for purpose" while living long-term in that same house makes my eye twitch.
Depends a bit on whether it was "not fit for purpose" knowingly before living there, or part-way through. A landlord shouldn't be able to get around rental protections by intentionally neglecting the property, nor should they be able to hide serious problems and go "welp, move out" when discovered.
Just like rent control.
If your sympathies side with those on the side of the parasitic rent extraction machine depleting the productive capacity of the real economy (the side of the economy where people work rather than charge for access to assets), you won't be a champion of either of these things and will argue that they are well meaning but inadvertently bad for the victims of the parasites.
Realistically some parasites can't be killed without killing the host - they entrench themselves that deeply. When Cuba decided to overhaul land rights, for example, the US invaded.