That would be illegal in any jurisdiction I know of. I'm renting my current apartment; obviously my landlord cannot rent it out to someone else while I still live here. Now you might say: but what if you're living there illegally? Well, I'm not, say I! Now we have a civil disagreement over property and a contract, which is a matter for the courts to decide. If the landlord alleges I no longer have a right to use of this property, despite possessing it in fact (e.g. because I am weeks or months late with my rent, or the rental has otherwise been legally terminated), they can get an order that I be evicted, which the police would enforce. There will be some kind of process, where I would have a chance to reply, for example by giving evidence that actually I paid my rent on July 1, and the landlord is mistaken in his allegations. If I lose and am evicted, then after that, the landlord can re-rent the apartment. But before that, they cannot.
"That would be illegal in any jurisdiction I know of. I'm renting my current apartment; obviously my landlord cannot rent it out to someone else while I still live here."
Right, you probably have a lease. If you had a squatter's lease--or a de facto lease--couldn't she just allow more squatters?
I don't think what you say has direct bearing on this situation because you both entered into a specific agreement. There is most likely the precedent of you paying the landlord money, which shows you both agreed to a set of conditions.
Since these guys are squatters, they probably default to a default "lease" as defined by law. So the fact whether they are there illegally as held by the landlord doesn't even enter into it.
It's not really squatting in this case, which is where someone takes up residence in a property they have never had a contractual right to, like building a log cabin on your farmland, and then living in it for years. That's a different set of laws.
This is rather a person who had a legitimate lease, but has violated or exceeded it. Here they clearly had a legal right to lease the apartment for the first 44 days: this lease was agreed to via AirBnB. And the renters paid the first 30 days of it. Now they refuse to pay for the remaining 14 days of the original agreement, and also refuse to vacate after 44 days. That falls squarely into eviction law: if someone previously had a legitimate lease but now the landlord alleges that they don't (because of nonpayment, exceeding agreed conditions, etc.), they can be evicted. How, exactly, depends on the country & state/province.
While it is less like squatting which I should have realized and I'm glad you that pointed out, I wasn't addressing that as much as I should have been. There was an arrangement for X amount of days, which they have overstayed, so I am wondering where California law falls there. Because now they are in a default lease, one exists on the lawbooks. It's enough of a differentiation to possibly give her a little bit more leverage. I wonder what the loopholes are that she could utilize to make life un-enjoyable for them.
Read the excerpts from California law that I posted in some other comments. IANAL, but the code is pretty specific to point out that the protections against harassment apply to "any lease or other tenancy or estate at will, however created, of property used by a tenant as his residence". As a landlord, I also have been told that judges have a tendency to dismiss eviction suits where there is substantiated evidence of harassment.
