Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Dearborn, MI

A city that checks the unit before anyone moves in

Dearborn does something most Michigan cities do not: it requires a rental to be inspected and to hold a Certificate of Occupancy before it can be let. The certificate issues only after an inspector’s cited violations have been repaired and confirmed on re-inspection, and the city says the inspection should be scheduled well in advance of listing the property.

For a renter, that has one useful consequence and one trap.

The consequence: most Dearborn landlords have already been through a formal process with a file, a form and a deadline, so a written accommodation request is a familiar object rather than an unwelcome surprise.

The trap: none of that paperwork decides the animal question. A landlord’s registration status (current, lapsed, or never filed), changes nothing about the duty at MCL 37.1506a(1)(b), and it is not a card for either side to play.

The rule your request is actually asking about

Michigan’s Persons with Disabilities Civil Rights Act makes it unlawful, in a real estate transaction, to “[r]efuse to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services, when the accommodations may be necessary to afford the person with a disability equal opportunity to use and enjoy residential real property.” The federal Fair Housing Act regulation, 24 C.F.R. § 100.204(a), is nearly word-for-word the same.

A no-pets clause is a rule. So is a weight cap. The Michigan Department of Civil Rights, which enforces the state act, names “[a]llowing a service or support animal in a no-pet complex” as an example of what these laws require.

The landlord’s escape route is narrow and it is theirs to open: MCL 37.1102(2) requires the accommodation “unless the person demonstrates that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship.”

31.6 percent of Dearborn rents, at $1,327

11,597 of Dearborn’s 36,695 occupied homes are rented. Median gross rent is $1,327: higher than Detroit’s $1,074 and Westland’s $1,158, and closer to the Oakland County suburbs than to the rest of Wayne County.

That figure sets one hard number: Michigan caps total deposits at one and a half months’ rent, so roughly $1,991 here.

It also sets expectations. At Dearborn rents a landlord asking for a full month’s deposit plus a $500 pet deposit is close to the statutory ceiling before any other charge is added, which is a useful thing to notice on a lease you have not yet signed.

Deposits, and the definition that catches a pet deposit

MCL 554.601(d) defines 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.” A refundable pet deposit fits that definition exactly, so it is not an extra charge sitting outside the cap. It is part of the same $1,991.

The act also constrains what the money is for. MCL 554.607 allows it to be used only for actual damage that is “the direct result of conduct not reasonably expected in the normal course of habitation” and for rent and utility arrears. MCL 554.606 says none of these 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 tenancy because of disability, and a charge that exists only because of the animal is such a term. Monthly pet rent is a separate question that Michigan does not regulate at all, and neither does Dearborn.

“It’s an older building”

In a city with a lot of pre-war and mid-century housing, the refusal often arrives dressed as a maintenance concern: the floors, the carpets, the plaster.

The law has an answer for both halves. Damage that actually happens is chargeable against the deposit in the ordinary way under MCL 554.607. Damage that might happen is not a reason to refuse: the landlord has to demonstrate an undue hardship, not describe a worry. And 24 C.F.R. § 100.202(d)’s direct-threat limit is about a tenancy that would threaten the health or safety of others, judged on this animal’s conduct rather than on its species or size.

The practical move is to ask, in writing, what specific hardship the accommodation would cause. Either you get an answer that can be addressed: a deposit conversation, a carpet clause, or you get a refusal with nothing behind it, dated, in your file.

It is also worth knowing that a landlord who has just finished an inspection cycle is unusually well placed to answer that question, because they have a recent, written record of the unit’s condition. Where the concern is genuine, that record is the basis for a sensible arrangement. Where the concern is a pretext, it tends not to survive being asked for in writing at all.

What they may ask you for, and what they may not

When neither your disability nor the animal’s role is apparent, a Dearborn landlord is entitled to verification, but of three specific things, not of everything. A 2004 joint statement by HUD and the Department of Justice, which the Michigan Court of Appeals worked from in Riverbrook v Fabode, frames it as information showing that you meet the definition of disability, describing the accommodation you need, and connecting the two. A letter that does those three jobs is a complete answer.

What they may not do:

• Demand your medical records. 24 C.F.R. § 100.202(c) restricts inquiries into the existence, nature or severity of a disability.
• Demand an expert. The Michigan Supreme Court’s order of 29 November 2022 vacated any reading of Riverbrook requiring expert-witness testimony, because “[t]he statutes contain no such requirement.”
• Demand registration. Michigan’s only official register, run by the Department of Civil Rights, covers trained service animals, confers no legal privileges or protections, and the department tells anyone required by a landlord to register an animal to file a complaint.

Filing, in your own language if you need to

The Michigan Department of Civil Rights takes complaints on 1-800-482-3604, through its online portal, or by a Zoom appointment through Virtual Intake. Michigan Relay is on 711. Its departmental pages are published in Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish alongside English.

That matters practically as well as symbolically: nothing in the Persons with Disabilities Civil Rights Act requires the request to your landlord to be made in English, or in any particular words. What matters is that a reasonable person would understand it as asking for an exception because of a disability. Write it in the language you write best, and keep a copy.

The clocks, and the county

180 days to file with MDCR from the act. Three years in state court for a complaint outside that window with no federal jurisdiction, on the department’s own account, venue under MCL 37.1606(2) being Wayne County Circuit Court or wherever the landlord has its principal place of business. One year to HUD under 24 C.F.R. § 103.35.

For help in the meantime, the Fair Housing Center of Metropolitan Detroit covers Wayne County and names Dearborn in its service area, and Legal Aid and Defender Association serves Wayne, Oakland and Macomb. Neither of them can stop your 180 days, so start it running.