While it varies from place to place, this is false.
There is no lawyer who will defend tenants against landlords
There are many such lawyers.
all they have to do is decide not to renew your lease
That's true generally. If the lease says "1 year" it does not imply "n years". You seem to think that is a problem--that a contract says what it means. In some very lefty places, to be sure, tenants will stop paying and squat, and landlords have a years-long nightmare.
...
As for the article, your typical good-credit, good-income tenants who have options might actually be able to use the service to save trouble. Your typical deadbeats have to take what they can get, bad reviews or otherwise. Another potential user would be professional scammers, who might be able to discern which of the "bad" landlords are just hard-asses who expect to be paid, and so could use the service to avoid them.
There's a missing middle problem. The actual, real BAD deadbeat tenants know the law and every corner of it (you can find horror stories if you dig in landlord areas; the final usual sure emergency release is the landlord selling the property outright, but that can be hard if the property has been trashed). The actual, real BAD deadbeat landlords know the law and every corner of it, too.
And rich, really good tenants don't know the law and never need to; they pay enough that problems never occur, or if they do they throw money at it or just move away.
It's the missing middle where you have working-class to upper middle-class tenants who don't know the law and how to enforce it, and the same on the side of the landlords.
While it varies from place to place, this is false.
There is no lawyer who will defend tenants against landlords
There are many such lawyers.
all they have to do is decide not to renew your lease
That's true generally. If the lease says "1 year" it does not imply "n years". You seem to think that is a problem--that a contract says what it means. In some very lefty places, to be sure, tenants will stop paying and squat, and landlords have a years-long nightmare.
...
As for the article, your typical good-credit, good-income tenants who have options might actually be able to use the service to save trouble. Your typical deadbeats have to take what they can get, bad reviews or otherwise. Another potential user would be professional scammers, who might be able to discern which of the "bad" landlords are just hard-asses who expect to be paid, and so could use the service to avoid them.