There's the whole "house as a human right" angle that is sometimes used to explain why tenant friendly laws exist, but it's not the only angle you have to approach the problem from. It's also true that a cities economy needs a lot of "minimum wage" or whatever workers, and for example if San Francisco didn't have tenant friendly laws like rent control then the hospitality industry would also suddenly need to pay a lot more to get bodies for their people-heavy business. After some deep conversations with a friend about this I now see this from his angle where cities are just state-sponsored big HOAs. If you get property in the HOA you have to abide by their rules and one of their rules is that for certain types of property if you rent it you can't easily kick out the tenants. If you don't like it, no one is forcing you to buy the property and even less to rent it, it's your call.