Comment Re:Many questions (Score 2) 55
Yes, landlords can restrict subleases. Though cities could probably override such contract requirements, and landlords could make exceptions. Plus that only applies to renters in the first place; AirBnB includes a lot of owner-occupied and investment properties.
In terms of safety, have some faith. Yes, it's possible that someone will wait for a natural disaster, sign up for emergency housing, head to a randomly selected AirBnB property, and commit a crime. But that's a fairly elaborate plan with lots of moving parts the planner cannot even influence; if their intent was to harm whatever non-specific household they were assigned they could do it without so much hassle. But more importantly, the vast majority of people won't seek to harm their hosts, and we should not choose to let them suffer just on the off chance that Bond villain is waiting to take advantage of the situation. You have a much, much, much greater risk of dying in an motor vehicle accident, but you probably never think twice about getting on the road; don't overestimate the risk here.
It's also not clear that this situation would require weeks of housing. In many evacuations people only couple of days of housing, and even if their particular residence is unavailable for weeks a city as a whole can generally organize longer-term housing for the small number of people who need it, once the short-term need recedes.
In terms of families, if you're worried about natural disasters you should first be appalled at homeless shelters. In most cities there are no shelters that will take entire families on an emergency basis -- they'll take women and children, or men, but not men and women (and sometimes not even men and children). Frequently males must continue to live on the street while the rest of their family is in a shelter until they can get enrolled as a family in a longer-term solution (thankfully many longer-term providers make a provision for entire families, though there are a more than a few women-and-children-only long-term shelters as well); I'm sure they'd rather the rest of their family get shelter than not, but the gender discrimination hurts everyone, including the women and children in the shelter. That happens every night; if you're okay with that you can probably get over the possibility of breaking up a family for a couple of days after a disaster.