I’d be interested in a purely factual answer to this question from someone who understands the law. If a landlord rents out an apartment building, obviously the Fair Housing Act applies. At the other extreme, as laid out above, presumably not. What exactly is the criterion for when it applies?
(ETA: To k9bfriender) You might be unaware that some people have allergies and some people have phobias and some people simply want, for reasons of their own which are none of your or anyone’s business, to live in a community without pets. Since you obviously don’t understand why someone might be in that third category, namely me, let me tell you about the first two categories. Severely allergic people are triggered by pet dander in common areas and prefer to live where they can feel comfortable using the community’s common areas without planning their every step defensively. I think they have a right to do so. One of my friends, in a nearby community, is terrified, absolutely phobic, of dogs in particular, and is extremely pissed off to find out that several of her neighbors (in an apartment building that is ostensibly pet-free) own large, ill-tempered, unruly aggressive dogs that scare the bejesus out of her on a daily basis. I happen to have sympathy for my friend, and wish that I could do more for her than advise her to move to rural Alaska. Her psychological condition might not seem reasonable to a pet-lover, but it is her condition nonetheless and I wish the regulations against owning pets other than service animals could be enforced.
For entering a business you are not supposed to question it.
For employment or housing, you may.
The messed up thing is, that right now, they are the only ones who do. If you enter my restaurant with your “service dog”, I can get into trouble if I question it. If another customer does so, they are perfectly fine to do so. (legally, though they may come across as an asshole.)
I don’t know that you really need to prove significant need. To who’s satisfaction? I know someone with PTSD from being in the military who literally cannot leave her house without her dog. She has trained her dog exceptionally well, and there are no complaints as to her behavior, but not everyone does.
It does seem as though focusing on the dog, making sure that it is well behaved, is going to be easier and more palatable than focusing on whether or not someone really needs the dog.
Right, and rather than question that, instead of their depression being what classifies their pet as ESA, it being the pet’s training being what classes it as so.
The reason for fees is because animals are disruptive and damaging. If there’s a chance you are going to need to replace the carpet because of poop and pee, and replace the gnawed on door moldings, then you need to charge more. If a pet is well trained to not cause these problems, then the only reason to charge a fee is to make more money off of the disabled person than you would a non-disabled person.
First, you have to stop using the word community- it’s too non-specific if you are going to use it to mean everything from a plot of land that you and I buy and build two houses on to a co-op or condo development to a building full of rental apartments to a development with a homeowners association to a municipality. Second, anything other than the first option is going to have to allow ESA’s whether they want to or not- the Fair Housing Act requires it.
None at all.
Until you decide to rent out a room on that property, and refuse someone because they have a legally recognized service animal.
You seem to be confusing private property from a business that needs to follow public accomodation laws.
No it doesn’t. It just expresses their personal desire to live somewhere where pets are allowed. To make the accusation that it takes offense at your desire to live differently requires adding a bunch of words and entirely changing the meaning. I can’t see why anyone would choose to do this unless what they are doing is looking for something to which to take offense.
Just saw this - the FHA applies to
The Fair Housing Act covers most housing. In very limited circumstances, the Act exempts owner-occupied buildings with no more than four units, single-family houses sold or rented by the owner without the use of an agent, and housing operated by religious organizations and private clubs that limit occupancy to members.
And even if the landlord of your less than 4 unit building doesn’t allow animals, the one next door might
That’s a good point. If it’s going to work, it would mean introducing objective behavioral standards and testing for assistance animals too. Although the standards would be much less stringent, since there’s no requirement that the dog be tolerant of (say) crowds of people in a strange place. Just that its behavior at home is not unreasonably disruptive to neighbors.
I really like this approach, it seems far less open to abuse. It feels very uncomfortable to challenge a letter from a therapist certifying that the person has some medical condition. But instead, you have an assessor who visits the home, checks out the dog, and issues the “assistance animal” certification. That would also provide a reasonable recourse for neighbors or landlord in no-pet housing to ask for mediation and re-assessment if the animal did subsequently cause a nuisance.
I live in a community (NB Doreen: community, community, community) that has in its bylaws, which I am committing to following prior to being permitted to buy my home inside this community (NB Doreen), a prohibition against any property-owner having any animal on the premises other than legally recognized service animals. My question remains: how can I have this codicil, written into our bylaws, enforced? This has NOTHING to do with public vs. private accommodation laws.
never mind
You can’t since the FHA applies to
" Any person or entity engaging in prohibited conduct - i.e. , refusing to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services, when such accommodations may be necessary to afford a person with a disability an equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling - may be held liable unless they fall within an exception to the Act’s coverage. Courts have applied the Act to individuals, corporations, associations and others involved in the provision of housing and residential lending, including property owners, housing managers, homeowners and condominium associations, lenders, real estate agents, and brokerage services. Courts have also applied the Act to state and local governments, most often in the context of exclusionary zoning or other land-use decisions.
If you haven’t done even the rudimentary step of figuring out EXACTLY which unit/apartment/whatever has the dog that is annoying you and made a complaint about nuisance barking to your enforcement board then how, exactly, do you expect them to do something about it? You seem to have missed the step where you reported the dog’s behavior and made a complaint about it and nobody did anything. If you’ve made the complaints and gotten no satisfaction or enforcement of the bylaws then I could see being upset about it, but if you won’t help you then who will?
I’m trying to figure out in advance of putting myself to all that trouble whether or not there’s anything that can be done to enforce the regulation. I suspected not, and after asking here, I’m convinced that the person might, if he wants to, defy the regulations for years to come. Easier to move myself inside unless I can be convinced that the regs can be enforced.
In a sense, SmartAleq, you’re illustrating the whole point of defying this regulation. Anyone who wants it enforced must go through a world of filing complaints, testifying before hearing boards, providing evidence, gathering supporting testimony against anyone who wants to keep a pet. If it were as simple as notifying my HOA that X is keeping a dog that he is not allowed, then I would file a complaint. But as everyone is telling me, X has rights, by God, and his right to have a pet in a pet-free community (Hi, Doreen!!) is absolute, so the hell with the process. To my mind, I should file a complaint on Monday, the Board should inform X that any non-service animal is in violation of the HOA regs that he agreed to, and that should be that. But that’s not how it works, so I prefer to take my laptop indoors rather than play this futile game.
If you question that, then you are questioning their disability. That is ethically, morally and legally wrong, unless you are their MD or are a few Government employees
And you really cannot see the flaw in this reasoning?
Let’s abolish passports and passport control. What moral right do we have to question whether an American has the right to enter their own country?
Wow, that is a non-sequitur.
To the contrary, it’s a perfect analogy of the flawed reasoning. If you can’t grasp that, I doubt I can help you, but I’ll spell it out.
The purpose of any type of verification is obviously not to disrespect the people who do have the right to do something. Do you feel that someone is disrespecting your status as an American citizen if they ask to see your passport at passport control? So why would verifying the certification of a service animal (at an appropriate time and place) be seen as disrespectful of someone’s disability status?
If you don’t verify, and you have no enforced standards, cheats and abusers multiply until the system breaks. As we’ve seen with ESAs on airlines. Because there were no credible standards and no enforcement, the system was so widely abused that assistance animals are no longer allowed at all - including the assistance animals of people with genuine need that are well trained. Absence of verification and enforcement does not help people with genuine need.
The people who ask are authorized Government agents, not some dude on a message board.
If you can’t grasp that, I doubt I can help you, but I’ll spell it out.
What on earth are you talking about? As I’ve said (clearly and repeatedly) nobody is suggesting that a random stranger should have the right to walk up to someone on the street and demand to see their dog’s papers. But verification at (for example) hotel check-in is perfectly appropriate. Currently, hotel staff are leery of questioning even obvious abusers who bring badly behaved aggressive dogs purporting to be service dogs into a hotel for fear of the ADA.
Are those people authorized Government agents ?
No, they are not even AUTHORIZED GOVERNMENT AGENTS.
Do you understand what an analogy is?
The subset of human beings who are appropriate to check a passport is not the same subset of human beings who are appropriate to verify a dog’s status as a service dog. That does not break the analogy.
The point is that the purpose of verification is never to disrespect the people who do have a right to do something. It is to police the system for cheating.