Reasonable Accommodation Form Housing: Fill & Download for Free

No, the Fair Housing Act requires landlords to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities, but that means that existing elevators must be properly maintained, and that ground floor units be accessible to people with disabilities.Multi-unit buildings constructed after 1991 have to meet stricter requirements for access, and common area and ground floor units must be safely accessible to wheelchair users. Landlords are not required to provide elevators or make all units in a building accessible to people with disabilities, but the ADA does require landlords to keep any elevators in the building safely functional.Landlords are required to make reasonable accommodations for tenants with disabilities, regardless of the type of home, and we must make reasonable modifications to the house or apartment. While the tenant must pay for these modifications inside the home (like lowering countertops or installing handrails in the bathroom), the landlord is responsible for making the building itself accessible.The cost of adding elevators to a building would be extreme, thus this is not a reasonable accommodation. The changes I have had to make to buildings I purchased rather than built, to comply with federal law, include things like wheelchair ramps, flattening thresholds or other measures to make older doorways with a small curb accessible, disabled parking, and larger parking spots for vans.The modifications I have been required to make never cost me more than a couple of thousands of dollars, but the accommodations you can be required to make depend on things like the type of home, how many you own, how it’s managed, etc. Since I own a larger number of units and operate an agency, I am expected to do more than someone who rents out their basement.

My landlord is still trying to charge me pet fees even though my dogs are ESA, I’ve filed a complaint with HUD but what else can I do?There are a few issues here that I’m not sure if you’re aware of:Landlords must make reasonable accommodations for the handicapped. That does not mean they have to do anything and everything asked of them. For instance, if they have a 3 story house that’s divided into 4 apartments, and one is on the 3rd floor, they are not required to put in an elevator or to massively renovate the building so a handicapped person can move into that apartment.Laws vary from state to state in landlord tenant law and in terms of how ESAs are dealt with.There is still a lot of confusion about ESAs. People still remember the woman with a peacock claiming it was an ESA and should be allowed on the plane with her. (The airline said, “No!” and it seems that was upheld. There were multiple issues with allowing a peacock on that flight - the woman claiming it was an ESA was one issue that was trumped by other safety issues. Plus - well, peacocks as an ESA really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.)There are dozens of websites that will provide certificates saying an animal is an ESA. With that in mind, it’s rather hard to convince someone an animal is a legitimate ESA and not just a favorite pet that someone wants to get authority to take everywhere with them.Even if you have full proof, including documentation from a qualified mental health professional, in your state, that may not mean that you get a free pass on keeping an animal in your apartment without paying pet fees.Look at points #1 and #4. The landlord is asked to make reasonable accommodations. That doesn’t mean he has to spend or lose money making accommodations. There are reasons for pet fees. Pets damage properties. Dogs scratch. Even well trained dogs sometimes make messes. Cats use a litter box, but the area around it often gets messed up. Tanked pets, like fish, or lizards and snakes, are usually not an issue, but some reptile owners often leave the reptiles out of tanks and there’s no way of potty training them.The reason for pet fees is to cover the additional wear and tear a pet causes in an apartment or house. Expecting to keep an animal in an apartment or rental house without paying a fee is asking a landlord to allow extra wear and tear to an apartment without anything to cover that. It is asking them to lose money.What you’re asking for are not reasonable accommodations. You’re being allowed to keep your ESA in the apartment (or house) with you. What you’re asking for is to be able to do that at the expense of the property owner. It’s very likely, in many states, he could have just rejected your application without giving you a reason. Instead he is allowing you to have your pet. Asking for a pet fee is not screwing you over, it’s asking for coverage for the extra wear a pet causes during your tenancy.I understand that you want to keep your pet with you, but there is another side to the story, too. Remember, also, that landlords deal with thousands of ways tenants want to get something from them for free. He has no idea how well trained your dogs are or what kind of damage they will or will not do to his property.

Yes.There are limits to my capacity to accept both her “need” for that specific animal as emotional support and a public serving corporation’s requirement to accommodate that need. I don’t care if she was trapped in a house with her family as strangers broke in, torturing them to death one-by-one until she was the last survivor, running down the street screaming for help. Don’t care. Don’t wanna’ hear it. Don’t give a shit.Know why I don’t give a shit?Simple.When we accommodate people, there’s a balancing act that states that it should be the minimal accommodation necessary for that individual and not be an undue financial or structural burden on the organization AND those other consumers being served at the same time as the individual.Going back to my days as an HR manager. We had a young lady who suffered from a physical disability that prevented her from walking without crutches or standing very long. She wanted to be a cashier. We removed a non-essential function from the job (standing) by providing her a stool. It placed a MINIMAL (thus reasonable) financial burden on the company (a stool) but that minimal accommodation must ELEVATE her capacity to that equal of the basic standard of the job.Notice that, right? She’s still required to perform the same job. The job cannot change to accommodate her. For example, at that place, there’s a minimum number of products you must be able to scan per minute or you could not remain a cashier. Legally not only is it inappropriate to do so, but it’s unethical because we’d thus be re-defining the job and creating something wholly new for her.With one adjustment, that individual was able to perform the critical job functions. That’s how the accommodation works. Likewise, I also had another individual who could not perform the job function. Her mother wanted us to give her a job scanning at the registers but have someone else bag the products. That wasn’t a reasonable accommodation. It wasn’t reasonable because we would have needed to hire a second person to stand there and do nothing but bag for her while simultaneously removing a critical function of her job code.They threatened to sue and after a short amount of some investigation, the lady quit and we never heard from them again.A service animal cannot place an undue burden on the people serving the customer or the other customers in the area. There is no conceivable reason that this woman should have been accommodated. Peacocks shit something fierce, a fact that cannot be trained out of them. They are incredibly loud squackers. They are basically dinosaurs with pretty feathers who have minimal ability to be “trained” to react certain ways. If it’s her comfort animal, then she gets to be comfortable at home. For the rest, get a dog. IF she doesn’t like dogs, then we’re back at the fact that some people in society slip through the cracks and the attempt to close every single crack by law ends up creating a byzantine set of legal problems that destroy the system and, well, let morons think they can bring a stupid peacock on an airline.For once, rationalism wins.