It seems like a lot of these new startups are the same old business model but skirt costly taxes and regulation (Uber for taxis, Airbnb for hotels, Bitcoin for money transfers)
I'm not arguing for or against the laws, but I think it's clear why many residents of such a city would decide to use legal force to prevent that.
If the apartment next door turned into a hotel, there would be random people coming and going and I wouldn't be able to count on any of this. I would expect more problems, but even worse, rotating problems, where someone comes and goes and then another person comes. At least if it's one person you can talk to them and work things out, but if it's a new person every 2 days, it's all over again from the beginning each time, and they may not even care, because they aren't invested in living here.
1. It's hard to imagine that there's a ton of democratic oversight over hotel regulation. Prior to AirBnB, did anyone EVER, in your life, suggest to you that you should be concerned about the specifics of hotel regulation in your town?
2. These are local laws. Smaller government components, like city, county, and state, are probably more vulnerable to being captured by medium or large businesses than the federal government is, due to less sophistication and professionalism of the politicians (especially) and bureaucrats (less so).
3. A big hotel has a lot of incentive to try to corrupt local regulation to quash competitors and shore up their business. It directly affects their bottom line.
4. These regulations have accreted over time, leading to complex regulations that have lots of loopholes and potentially anachronistic components to them.