Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Commerce City, CO

A city of 70,245 with 5,115 rented homes

Of the 22,415 occupied homes in Commerce City, 5,115 are rented. That works out to 22.8%, well under the 33.8% recorded for Colorado as a whole, on the 2020-2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates from table B25003. Among the state’s twenty largest cities, almost none has a smaller renting population. The city’s population estimate is 70,245 on the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2024 series.

A thin rental market changes the texture of an assistance animal request. Fewer requests get made here, so fewer landlords have handled one before, and the person reading yours may be deciding a fair housing question for the first time. That is not a reason to ask for less. It is a reason to put the request in writing and to name the statute you are relying on.

Three housing authorities serve this area

Adams County’s housing resident resources page lists three separate housing authorities working in and around the city: Maiker Housing Partners, which operates county-wide, Brighton Housing Authority, and a Commerce City Housing Authority. Which one has anything to do with your home depends on the programme your unit falls under, not on your street address.

For a renter, that produces one very practical question, who do I ask?, and the honest answer is that the county page is where to start identifying the right agency. What it does not change is who owes you the accommodation.

The duty belongs to the landlord, not the agency

This is the point worth pinning down before anything else. Under C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b), refusing to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services, where they are necessary to give a person with a disability an equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling, is discrimination. C.R.S. § 24-34-502(1)(k) makes that an unfair housing practice. The obligation attaches to the housing provider, the party you rent from.

So an authority may hold the contract, inspect the unit, or pay part of the rent without becoming the party that answers your request. Address the request to your landlord or property manager, and copy the agency if it manages your tenancy. Nobody administering a subsidy can transfer that duty away from the owner, and no owner can point at the subsidy to escape it.

No small-landlord exemption in Colorado

The other half of the same point matters more here than in a city of large apartment complexes. With a rental stock this small, a Commerce City tenant is often renting from an individual, sometimes from someone living on the same lot.

Federal fair housing law does not reach owner-occupied buildings of four units or fewer, and that gap is where the “I’m too small for this to apply to me” answer comes from. Colorado’s law has no equivalent gap for disability. The one small-property carve-out in the state statute, C.R.S. § 24-34-502(1.5)(a), covers properties of three units or fewer and is limited to the source-of-income rules. It says nothing about accommodations. A landlord with a single rented house is under the same duty as a management company.

What Commerce City landlords must follow from August 12

Signed on May 19, 2026, House Bill 26-1045 becomes operative on August 12, 2026. Its legislative declaration explains itself in one line: rescinded federal guidance is being restored, this time as Colorado statute.

Three pieces of it matter to a renter here. C.R.S. § 24-34-301(2.5) puts service animals and emotional support animals under a single heading. An assistance animal is one that works, performs tasks, assists, or gives therapeutic emotional support to somebody who has a disability. C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(A) presumes that allowing an assistance animal in housing is a reasonable accommodation, so long as the provider has been given the chance to engage in an interactive accommodation process. C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(B) presumes that banning assistance animals outright is discriminatory.

That proviso in the first presumption is the part to act on. Give the landlord the opportunity (ask, in writing, before the animal moves in), and the presumption is yours to use.

Documentation, and what a landlord may fairly ask

Under C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(C), a request for reasonable documentation is not by itself discrimination. Your landlord may ask about the disability, may ask about the disability-related need, and may run a good faith interactive process. None of that crosses the line. The exception is an obvious disability or an obvious need, where the questions should stop. Being asked is normal. Being asked for the wrong things is not.

The subject matter is fixed by that wording: your disability, and why you need the animal. C.R.S. § 24-34-501(1.3) includes a mental impairment (any behavioural, mental, or psychological disorder), within disability. Questions about the animal’s breed, weight, obedience training, or listing on some website fall outside the enquiry, and no Colorado body issues a registration, registry entry, or certificate that would answer one.

Who Colorado allows to make the finding

The state regulates the writer of the letter as tightly as it regulates the landlord, and the rule splits by profession. C.R.S. § 12-245-229(3)(a) stops a mental health licensee (psychologist, licensed counsellor, social worker, or marriage and family therapist), from making a finding unless they have met the patient in person. C.R.S. § 12-240-144(3)(a) is looser for physicians, permitting either an in-person visit or telemedicine.

In both cases the professional must be sufficiently familiar with the patient and the disability, be legally and professionally qualified, and set down a written finding on the disability plus a separate written finding on the disability-related need, or a finding that they lack sufficient information. Currency and the quality of the source are what make a letter hold up.

That written finding does a second job. Since March 1, 2022, intentionally misrepresenting an entitlement to an assistance animal for housing has been a class 2 civil infraction under C.R.S. § 18-13-107.3, but only where the person was already given a written or verbal warning. A finding made under § 12-240-144(1)(a) or § 12-245-229(1)(a) is an affirmative defence, and the absence of one is expressly not proof of the offence.

Pet charges, breed rules, and the deposit at the end

Since January 1, 2024, C.R.S. § 38-12-106 has set two ceilings for a pet: three hundred dollars of additional deposit, refundable, and pet rent of thirty-five dollars a month, or one and one-half percent of the rent, if that is the greater of the two. Those ceilings govern pets. An approved assistance animal is not a pet, and dropping the charge is the sort of exception to a policy that C.R.S. § 24-34-501(3.5) contemplates.

Insurance is the usual reason given for a breed rule on a single-family rental. C.R.S. § 10-4-110.8(16) prohibits an insurer from refusing or surcharging a homeowner’s or dwelling fire policy because of a dog’s breed, and from asking about breed except whether the dog has been declared dangerous.

At move-out, C.R.S. § 38-12-103 as rewritten from January 1, 2026 returns the deposit within thirty days, or sixty if the lease says so. The landlord must prove both that a withholding was not wrongful and what the actual damages were; keeping 125% or more of those damages is presumed unreasonable; and a written request obliges him to hand over photographs, receipts, invoices, or estimates within fourteen days. Wrongful retention carries treble damages plus fees and costs after seven days’ written notice of intent to sue.

If the request is refused

The charge goes to the Colorado Civil Rights Division, and C.R.S. § 24-34-504(1) allows one year from the discriminatory act before the claim dies. The Division cannot extend that, and it draws a line most people miss: completing intake in CaseConnect has not filed anything. A charge is drafted and signed after intake, so leaving it until month eleven is a risk with no upside. As a HUD-certified Fair Housing Assistance Program agency, the Division dual-files most housing matters under a state and a federal number.

Locally, the Denver Metro Fair Housing Center says it works across seven counties, Adams among them. Colorado Legal Services covers Adams County through its Denver Metro office, and its eviction clinic sits at the county seat rather than in the city: Wednesday and Friday, 8 to 11 a.m., at the Justice Center, 1100 Judicial Center Drive in Brighton. For rental questions that have not reached a courtroom, Colorado Housing Connects runs a bilingual statewide helpline on 844-926-6632.