People are upset that other people are better off than they are, and using the extra financial leverage to treat an apartment as a temporary vacation home. Jealousy, plain and simple.

Not even slightly. People are upset because homes surrounding theirs are being rented out to short term tenants that do not care about the long or even medium term future of the home and it's surroundings.

If you lived in an apartment building filled with tourists drunkenly stumbling around the stairwells, breaking fixtures and otherwise ruining the shared facilities, you might appreciate the concept.

I am in their position. And I am anything but sympathetic for that very reason.

Of course I'm not ok with people destroying things. But I don't think that having a law making subleasing illegal prevents that. You're acting as if the ability to do what I want with my property makes it a foregone conclusion that evil things will happen.

No, I'm acting as if the ability for an unlimited and unknown number of complete strangers to enter my apartment building makes it a foregone conclusion that evil things will happen, which is pretty much true. Even if the vast majority of AirBnB customers behave, the odds are that there will always be an outlier that will ruin it.

None of this is perfect of course. And rules can get pretty silly especially when you start talking about homeowners associations and historical districts and the like. But in the aggregate, these laws serve a useful purpose.