Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Lawrence, KS

The biggest renter market in Kansas that is not Wichita or Overland Park

Lawrence has 23,198 renting households out of 41,129 occupied homes, 56.4 percent on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate, against 32.8 percent statewide.

Manhattan is 56.5 percent. One-tenth of a percentage point ahead, with 12,584 renting households to Lawrence’s 23,198. So Manhattan holds the share superlative and Lawrence is the much larger market, and this page will not round the difference away in either direction.

Median gross rent is $1,091, thirty-one dollars above the $1,060 Kansas median. The 2024 Census estimate puts Lawrence at 97,271, sixth in the state.

A university town where more than half of all households rent is also a town where landlords have systems, forms and a checklist of things they ask for. In Kansas, one of the things on that checklist is a card that exists.

Kansas printed an ID card

This is the reason the registry myth is more persuasive in Kansas than almost anywhere. Most states have nothing resembling an assistance-animal identification document, so a landlord demanding one is asking for something imaginary.

Kansas has one in statute. K.S.A. 39-1111 describes it in detail: the legal name of the dog’s user, the name, address and telephone number of the facility, school or trainer, whether the dog is designated a guide, hearing assistance or service dog, and a picture or digital photographic likeness of the dog user and the dog.

That is a real document, described in a real statute, and a Lawrence landlord who has seen a reference to it is not hallucinating.

Three things end its relevance to your apartment

One: it is a public-places procedure.

The section opens by applying where a question arises whether an assistance dog qualifies to accompany a person with a disability “in or upon any place set forth in K.S.A. 39-1101.”

K.S.A. 39-1101 lists common carriers and modes of transportation; hotels, lodging places and places of public accommodation, amusement or resort, including food service establishments; and other places to which the general public is invited. Dwellings are not in it.

The housing words a Kansas tenant may have seen, “in the acquisition and use of rental, residential housing”, appear in K.S.A. 39-1102, 39-1107 and 39-1108. Each of those sections added housing to its own grant of rights. K.S.A. 39-1111 does not repeat them and refers only to 39-1101.

Two: it is permissive.

The person with a disability “may produce” the card. Not shall. It is a way of settling a dispute quickly at a hotel desk, not a licence you are required to hold, and nothing in the section conditions any right on carrying one.

Three: the user can write it.

K.S.A. 39-1111(a)(2) provides for a card where “the assistance dog has been trained by the person using the dog.” It contains the user’s legal name, their address, “a statement that the dog has been trained to mitigate the dog user’s disability,” and a photograph.

Read that again. The document is written and asserted by the person it describes.

A scheme whose own statute allows the holder to produce their own card is not a registry. There is no issuing authority, no verification, no Kansas database, and nothing to apply to.

What that means for the myth

A Kansas landlord asking for “the card” is asking for something that (a) does not apply to housing, (b) is optional where it does apply, and (c) in one of its two forms is written by the tenant.

Which is worth explaining rather than simply refusing, because the request usually comes from a genuine misunderstanding rather than from bad faith.

The offence, and where it stops

K.S.A. 39-1112 makes it a class A nonperson misdemeanor to:

“(a) Represent that such person has the right to be accompanied by an assistance dog in or upon any place listed in K.S.A. 39-1101 … unless such person has the right … ; or (b) represent that such person has a disability for the purpose of acquiring an assistance dog unless such person has such disability.”

Branch (a) is about access to public places. Branch (b) is about acquiring a dog. Neither reaches a housing accommodation request made to a landlord.

Kansas has created no offence of asking for an accommodation and being refused, and no equivalent of South Dakota’s SDCL 43-32-36, which lets a landlord evict and claim up to a thousand dollars for knowingly fraudulent housing documentation. That difference between the two states is real and worth knowing.

What actually governs the tenancy

K.S.A. 44-1016(h)(3)(B): discrimination includes “a refusal to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices or services, when such accommodations may be necessary to afford such person equal opportunity to use and enjoy residential real property.” 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B) says the same thing federally.

Neither asks for a card, a certificate, a registration or a photograph.

Charges attached to the animal come off under K.S.A. 44-1016(h)(2), discrimination in “the terms, conditions or privileges” of a rental. K.S.A. 58-2550(a)’s additional half-month pet deposit is available only “if the rental agreement permits the tenant to keep or maintain pets,” which an accommodation animal is not there under, and the unfurnished cap is one month’s periodic rent.

And do not reach for K.S.A. 39-1108, whose extra-charge bar in housing belongs to a “service dog, specially selected, trained and tested for the purpose.”

The clock on an academic lease

Kansas gives six months. K.S.A. 44-1005(i) runs them from the act, or from the last act where a continuing pattern is pleaded, and the complaint goes to the commission K.S.A. 44-1003 creates. On a twelve-month Lawrence lease signed in August, a September refusal expires the following March, inside the tenancy, which is more forgiving than a nine-month lease in a 180-day state.

What to say when the card is asked for

A short, non-confrontational answer usually ends it.

The Kansas card in K.S.A. 39-1111 applies to the public places listed in K.S.A. 39-1101: carriers, hotels, places of public accommodation, and not to dwellings; it is optional even there; and where a dog is self-trained, the statute has the user write the card themselves.

Then move the conversation to what does apply: a reasonable accommodation under K.S.A. 44-1016(h)(3)(B), supported by documentation from a clinician.

Most landlords who ask for the card are repeating something they read rather than testing you. The answer that works is an explanation, not a refusal.

What the landlord is actually entitled to consider

Start with a clinician you already see. If your care runs through the university’s health or counselling services and that is a genuine clinical relationship, that is the strongest and cheapest route, though campus services carry semester-long waitlists, are configured for short-course counselling rather than for writing disability determinations, and a clinician who has seen you twice may properly decline to make a finding yet.

Where that route is closed, a licensed evaluation is the same examination arranged deliberately: a licensed clinician determines whether a disability is present and whether this animal is connected to it, then writes the determination or explains that they cannot. Both endings are real.

Kansas printed a card and forgot to attach it to housing. What it did attach to housing is a question that only an assessment answers.