Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Clinton Township, MI

The largest township in Michigan, and a lot of renters

Clinton Township has 45,142 occupied homes and 15,514 of them are rented: 34.4 percent. That is more renter households than Wyoming, Troy or Farmington Hills, and more than any other township in the state’s twenty largest municipalities.

Median gross rent is $1,194, which sets Michigan’s deposit ceiling, one and a half months, at roughly $1,791 for everything a landlord holds.

The stock is genuinely mixed: apartment complexes on the main corridors, duplexes, houses, and manufactured-housing communities. Which one you live in changes who reads your request, not what the law asks of them.

A township is not a city, and that is only an administrative fact

There is no township civil rights department, no human relations commission, no local ordinance to complain under. A Michigan township is governed by a board of trustees and a supervisor, and Clinton Township publishes nothing of that kind.

What it does have is a Building Department running a residential rental programme: an inspection checklist of the items commonly examined, a residential rental packet, a fee schedule, and advice to owners to review the checklist before presenting a unit.

That is a housing-condition system. Your protection comes from elsewhere and is identical to a Detroit tenant’s: MCL 37.1506a(1)(b), enforced by the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, with the federal Fair Housing Act running alongside it.

The case that started here

Most states have no appellate decision about emotional support animals in housing. Michigan has one, and it came through Macomb Circuit Court before reaching the Court of Appeals, Riverbrook v Fabode, decided 17 September 2020 and published.

The facts will sound local: a manufactured-housing community with breed restrictions, a dog the community said was a prohibited breed, and documentation the landlord wanted to challenge.

The Court of Appeals held that the lower courts had “abandoned their roles as the gatekeepers of evidence under MRE 702” by accepting the tenant’s letter without letting it be tested. Then the Michigan Supreme Court, on 29 November 2022, vacated part of that decision: expert-witness testimony is not required in every accommodation case, because “[t]he statutes contain no such requirement”: naming both the federal act and MCL 37.1506a(1)(b).

Two working conclusions for a Clinton Township tenant. Your letter can be examined. Nobody can make you produce an expert.

Manufactured housing is inside the act by name

If you rent a lot or a home in a manufactured-housing community here, check the statutory definition before anyone tells you the rules are different.

MCL 37.1501(e) defines “real property” for the housing article to include “a building, structure, mobile home, real estate, land, mobile home park, trailer park, tenement, leasehold, or an interest in a real estate cooperative or condominium.”

Community rules about breed or size are rules. The accommodation duty is about rules. A management office that says “the community doesn’t allow that breed” has told you which rule needs an exception, not whether one is available.

The money, at $1,194 rent

Michigan’s cap is one and a half months’ rent — MCL 554.602 — about $1,791 here for everything held, and MCL 554.601(d) pulls a refundable pet deposit inside it by defining a security deposit to include any amount “returnable to the tenant on condition of return of the rental unit by the tenant in condition as required by the rental agreement.”

Beyond the ceiling, two more protections apply to every tenant: MCL 554.607 allows the deposit to be used only for damage from “conduct not reasonably expected in the normal course of habitation” and for rent and utility arrears, and MCL 554.606 says none of the act’s requirements can be waived in the lease.

For an approved assistance animal, the pet portion should not be charged at all. MCL 37.1502(1)(b) bars discrimination in the terms, conditions or privileges of a real estate transaction because of disability, and a charge attached only to the animal is such a term. Monthly pet rent sits outside the cap entirely, unregulated for a pet, and answered by the accommodation duty for an assistance animal.

Making the request in a mixed market

The same three elements travel to every type of landlord here: that you have a disability, that you are asking for an exception to the pet rule for an assistance animal, and a letter from a licensed professional who has evaluated you and can say what the animal does.

What changes is the address. In an apartment complex, ask who reviews accommodation requests and send it there. With an individual owner of a duplex or a house, send it to the person who signs the lease. In a manufactured-housing community, send it to the community manager and keep a copy for the office file that will exist whether or not you are shown it.

In all three, put a date on it and keep the reply.

One habit worth adopting in a township this size: note who you handed it to. Clinton Township’s rental market is large enough that on-site staff change between seasons, and a request that was verbally approved by someone who has since left is worth exactly as much as the email confirming it. If the approval came by phone, write a short note back the same day saying what was agreed and asking them to confirm. That single message converts a conversation into a record.

What can actually defeat a request

Not a rule, and not a preference. Two things:

Undue hardship, which MCL 37.1102(2) requires the provider to demonstrate. The accommodation is required “unless the person demonstrates” it.

A direct threat to the health or safety of others, the limit preserved by 24 C.F.R. § 100.202(d), which is a judgement about this animal’s conduct rather than about its species, size or breed.

If a refusal cites neither, one written question, what specific hardship would this cause?, usually produces either something you can solve or nothing at all.

Registration is not a thing here

Michigan’s only official animal identification is the Department of Civil Rights’ voluntary programme for trained service animals, under MCL 37.303. The department says the identification “may not be required as a barrier to entry”, that the patch and card “do not provide the animal or their handler any legal privileges or protections”, and that anyone “required to obtain service animal identification or register a service animal by a landlord” should file a complaint.

Nothing sold online has any standing in a Michigan tenancy.

Where to take it

Michigan Department of Civil Rights: 1-800-482-3604, online portal, or Virtual Intake by Zoom. 180 days from the refusal.

HUD. One year, under 24 C.F.R. § 103.35.

Fair Housing Center of Metropolitan Detroit. (313) 963-1274; it covers Macomb County and names Clinton Township in its service area, and it investigates rather than only advising.

Lakeshore Legal Aid, free civil legal help, (888) 783-8190 or online intake.

A township has no local body to slow the process down or to speed it up. That makes the 180 days the only date that matters, and it starts with the refusal, not with the day you decide to do something about it.