Disability

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This month, we’re going to review fair housing rules banning disability discrimination. Understanding these rules—and applying them properly—is key to protecting your community from fair housing trouble.

This month, the Coach reviews an increasingly common source of fair housing trouble: requests for assistance animals. There’s a lot of confusion over assistance animals, which can go by many names—service animals, therapy animals, companion animals, emotional support animals—and there are different sets of rules on when, where, and what types of animals may be used by individuals with disabilities in various settings.

This month, the Coach reviews how fair housing laws may affect how you handle environmental concerns in the upkeep of your community.

In this lesson, the focus is on disability discrimination, the leading cause of fair housing complaints filed each year. The reasons vary, but many stem from disputes over requests for reasonable accommodations—that is, exceptions to the community’s usual rules or policies—for applicants or residents with disabilities. Last year, for example, more than 3,300 of the 8,300 complaints—40 percent—of complaints received by HUD and its state and ...

This month, the Coach focuses on the rules limiting when and how you can ask for disability-related information. It can come up anytime an applicant or resident requests a reasonable accommodation. It’s a particularly big issue when dealing with requests for emotional support animals, given the increasing popularity of online certifications, which are often available with little more than a credit card.

In this lesson, the Coach reviews how fair housing rules may affect your ability to regulate smoking at your community. There has been a trend toward smoke-free housing policies, which recently got a big boost when HUD ordered all public housing agencies to go smoke-free by 2018. The new rule, which applies only to public housing, will affect 700,000 units nationwide.

In this lesson, the Coach highlights court cases, all decided in the past few months, involving reasonable accommodation requests.

Fair housing law bans discrimination based on disability, which, among other things, requires communities to make reasonable accommodations to rules, policies, or services when necessary to allow an individual with a disability to use and enjoy his or her home. More than half of the thousands of the fair housing complaints fil...

In this month’s lesson, the focus is on parking. Fair housing law bans discrimination based on disability, including refusing to grant requests by individuals with disabilities who need an exception to your parking policies as a reasonable accommodation so they may use and enjoy their homes.

In this Special Issue, the Coach follows up on our recent series on assistance animals by answering reader questions with updates on recent developments in the law.

This month’s lesson is the second of a two-part series on handling disability-related requests for assistance animals. In Part 1, we focused on who qualifies as an individual with a disability and when you must make a reasonable accommodation to your pet policies to allow an assistance animal at the community.