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

A quarter of the township rents

Shelby Township has 32,636 occupied homes and 8,399 of them are rented. 25.7 percent, in the middle of Macomb County’s range. Median gross rent is $1,346, which puts Michigan’s ceiling on total deposits at roughly $2,019.

The rental stock is mixed (apartment communities, condominium units let by their owners, single-family houses), so pet rules arrive in different shapes. The legal test does not change with the shape.

First, the request

MCL 37.1506a(1)(b) 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.”

Where the accommodation is granted, the pet rule is set aside and so are the charges attached to it: a pet deposit or monthly pet rent demanded because of the animal is a difference in treatment traceable to the disability, and MCL 37.1502(1)(b) forbids that in the terms, conditions or privileges of a tenancy.

What an accommodation does not do is make you responsible for less damage than any other tenant. Saying so in the request costs nothing and removes the objection most landlords reach for first.

Then the part most tenants get wrong

Michigan’s security deposit act runs on four clocks, and two of them belong to you. In a township where a lot of tenancies end with a move to a house purchase, this is where money is most often lost.

4 days: your forwarding address. MCL 554.611 requires the tenant to notify the landlord in writing, within four days after occupancy ends, of an address where communications under the act can be received. Miss it and the landlord is relieved of the duty to send a damages notice (though, as the section says, it “does not prejudice a tenant’s subsequent claim for the security deposit.”

30 days), the landlord’s itemised list. Under MCL 554.609 the landlord must mail an itemised list of damages claimed, including the estimated cost of repair of each item and the basis for it, together with a check or money order for the balance.

7 days: your reply. The same section requires the notice to carry, in 12-point boldface type at least four points larger than the body, this statement: “You must respond to this notice by mail within 7 days after receipt of same, otherwise you will forfeit the amount claimed for damages.”

45 days. The landlord’s lawsuit. MCL 554.613(1) requires the landlord either to commence an action for the damages claimed within 45 days after termination of occupancy or to return the balance.

Reply in writing even if you dispute everything. Keep a copy. Send it in a way that records the date.

The seven-day rule is the one that catches people, because it runs from receipt rather than from the end of the tenancy, and because a landlord who mails the notice on day 29 leaves you answering it in the middle of a move. Anyone moving out of a Shelby Township rental should assume the notice is coming and decide in advance where post will reach them, which is also the reason the four-day forwarding address matters more than it looks.

What can actually be deducted

Not the fact that an animal lived there. MCL 554.607 allows a deposit to be used only for damage that is “the direct result of conduct not reasonably expected in the normal course of habitation of a dwelling”, plus rent arrears, rent for premature termination, and unpaid utility bills.

Ordinary wear is not damage. Routine cleaning is not damage. A line item for “pet deodorising” with nothing behind it is exactly the kind of claim the seven-day response exists to dispute, and MCL 554.606 means the lease cannot have signed away your right to dispute it.

The distinction is easier to argue when you have something to compare against. If the landlord gave you a move-in inventory checklist, keep it; if they did not, make your own on the first day and email a copy to yourself. A dated photograph of a carpet in September is a complete answer to a claim about that carpet the following August.

Where the accommodation and the deposit meet

Two things can be true at once, and Shelby Township tenants should hold both.

An approved assistance animal carries no pet deposit and no pet rent. And if that animal damages a door frame, the cost of repairing the door frame comes out of the ordinary security deposit like anything else.

Keeping those separate in your own records helps at both ends. Photograph the unit at move-in and at move-out. Where the landlord accepted the accommodation in writing, keep that email with the move-out file. It prevents a “you were never allowed the animal” argument arriving twelve months later with new management.

It also matters if the property changes hands mid-tenancy, which happens often enough in this market to plan for. A new owner takes the tenancy as it stands, and an accommodation that exists only as a conversation with the previous owner is an accommodation you will be asked to justify again from the beginning.

The township has no office for this

Shelby Township is run by a board of trustees and a supervisor. There is no municipal civil rights body and no local ordinance to complain under, which is normal for a Michigan township and changes nothing about the statute that applies.

The route is the Michigan Department of Civil Rights: 1-800-482-3604, an online portal, or a Zoom appointment through Virtual Intake, within 180 days of a refusal. The Fair Housing Center of Metropolitan Detroit covers Macomb County and investigates independently on (313) 963-1274, and Lakeshore Legal Aid takes applications for free civil legal help on (888) 783-8190.

For a deposit dispute rather than a discrimination complaint, the forum is different: that is a district court claim, and Michigan Legal Help publishes self-help tools for it.

The letter, briefly

A licensed professional who has evaluated you, naming the condition, saying what the animal does about it.

Michigan’s Court of Appeals rejected a letter in Riverbrook v Fabode that came from one telephone call with no records and no testing, for a condition that had not been diagnosed. The Supreme Court’s order of 29 November 2022 then held that no expert-witness testimony is required by the federal Fair Housing Act or by MCL 37.1506a(1)(b).

Registration adds nothing. Michigan’s only official identification programme covers trained service animals and, the Department of Civil Rights says, gives the animal and handler no legal privileges or protections at all.

A short checklist for the end of a tenancy

• Give the forwarding address in writing within 4 days.
• Expect the itemised damages list within 30 days.
• Answer it in writing within 7 days of receiving it.
• Watch for the 45-day point: after that, the landlord must have sued or returned the balance.
• Keep the accommodation approval with the move-out paperwork.

None of those clocks are affected by the animal. That is the point: an accommodation puts you in the same position as any other tenant, and the deposit rules are where being in the same position is worth money.