I don't think it's understandable in any circumstance. If it's my home, I can do what I want with it unless I enter into a voluntary agreement to do something else.
It's just hotel owners being cronies. Same as taxi company owners raising license fees and banning Uber in a bunch of cities. It's anti-capitalist and as far as I'm concerned treasonous.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "treasonous", but I basically agree with everything here - I also don't understand how, in any size community, it benefits anyone except the hotel owners who have the wherewithal and funds to influence city council to pass laws that favor them - which is exactly what happened, along with a fair bit of "campaign donations", which was explained in some detail in the video.
You addressed it on a personal liberty level, and are dead-on in that perspective, but even from an economic viewpoint - these places were offering rates far lower than standard hotels were offering - meaning it was much more affordable to someone on a budget; by basically outlawing this kind of business, you are only hurting the people of Santa Monica. The tourists who would have come here for a weekend getaway or something will instead go someplace else that's cheaper - their money will instead go to some other town, who will reap the rewards of this activity in the form of sales taxes, as well as business owners in those areas receiving additional business instead of the Santa Monica area.
This sort of thing is all too common, and the ones who benefit are the business owners of the big hotels and the politicians who got some nice "campaign donations" from those companies. Most of the rest of the people of Santa Monica - not least of which the people who were making a good living for themselves with the Airbnb business - are all worse off as a result.
It's just hotel owners being cronies.
Not in the city I live in. It's a very quiet, affluent and older residential area. I'm on the young side for a resident being in my 30s. Every community within a mile of me has banned smoking. It's that kind of area where they can pass things like that.
For a large area, there are literally no hotels. Residents did not like the rowdy crowd coming in for a few days at a time during tourist season and disrupting their quiet community/neighborhoods. Full-time renters like myself are looked down upon.
I can understand why they did it, but I'm not saying I agree with it.
They did that in other smaller cities in SoCal around a year ago. Kind of understandable in a smaller community, but Santa Monica isn't exactly a "small beach community"