You gain in that you previously didn't have the right to turn your apartment or house into a hotel, and now you do. Of course, you may not like that trade-off.

You gain in that you previously didn't have the right to turn your apartment or house into a hotel, and now you do. Of course, you may not like that trade-off. You may, like me, have kids in those bedrooms, and enjoy having other families with kids around you who form lifelong friendships with your kids. You may not really want to see an investor buy the 3 bedroom apartment next to you and pay his or her own mortgage and profit by bringing a never ending stream of strangers into the house or apartment next door - even if these strangers are very well behaved. In short, you may wish to trade your right to turn your house into a hotel in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that your neighbors won't do this either. Or, alternatively, you may be ok with it in a more limited way, that perhaps you don't really mind people doing this occasionally, when they are on vacation, say for a limited number of days a year. If this is the case, then you would gain none of the benefits but experience all the negatives of disruption. As you can probably tell from the way I set this up, I feel it is immensely reasonable to zone certain sections of a city as residential with strong restrictions on short term rentals, as a way of protecting residents from the externalities of short term rentals, as well as a way of protecting long term housing stock.