Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Clovis, NM

The landlord who says the act does not apply to him

Clovis rents at $988 a month on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate, seventy-nine dollars under the $1,067 New Mexico median. 37.9 percent of its homes are rented: 5,662 of 14,957 occupied units, well above the 30.0 percent state figure. The 2024 Census estimate puts the city at 37,555 people, eighth in New Mexico, and Curry County runs its business from Gidding Street downtown.

If the place you rent here is a house let by an individual owner rather than a unit in a company-managed building, one paragraph of the Human Rights Act may decide your whole question. Ask for an exception to a no-pets rule, get refused, and the sentence that comes back is often this one: the Human Rights Act does not apply to me.

Sometimes that is right. The interesting part is what the statute lists when it says so.

§ 28-1-9(A), in full

NMSA 1978, § 28-1-9: Exemptions:

“Nothing contained in the Human Rights Act shall: A. apply to any single-family dwelling sold, leased, subleased or rented by an owner without the making of any notice, statement or advertisement with respect to the sale, lease, sublease or rental of a dwelling unit that indicates any preference, limitation or discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. This exemption is subject to these further reservations: (1) to qualify for the exemption, the seller must not be an owner of or own or have reserved any interest in more than three single-family dwellings; and (2) if the seller does not currently live in the dwelling or he was not the most recent occupant, the exemption granted in this section shall only apply to one sale in twenty-four months”

Read the opening words. Not “nothing in this act, other than the advertising rules.” Just “nothing contained in the Human Rights Act shall … apply.”

A condition, not a carve-out

Several states write their exemption so that the advertising ban survives it. The owner is excused from everything except the rule against discriminatory listings. New Mexico built the same material a different way.

Here the clean advertisement is not something held back from the exemption. It is a condition of getting the exemption at all. An owner qualifies only if the dwelling was let “without the making of any notice, statement or advertisement” indicating one of the listed preferences. Put a forbidden preference in the listing and the exemption is not available, and the whole act applies.

That is a stronger device than a carve-out, in principle. Then look at the list.

Eight classes, and the one that is missing

Race. Color. Religion. National origin. Ancestry. Sex. Sexual orientation. Gender identity.

Eight. Compare § 28-1-7(G)(1), the housing prohibition itself, which runs to race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, pregnancy, childbirth or a related condition, spousal affiliation, physical or mental disability and military status.

The prohibition protects disability. The condition attached to the exemption does not mention it.

On the face of the text that has a consequence a Clovis tenant should know before spending a month on it: an owner of a single-family rental who advertises a preference about disability does not lose § 28-1-9(A) by doing so. The condition lists eight things, and this is not among them.

What the omission is actually worth

Two things, in opposite directions, and the honest page says both.

Against you. The obvious lever (your own listing broke the condition, so the exemption is gone) is not available on a disability complaint about a single-family Clovis rental. It is available if the listing named one of the eight.

For you. The reservations in (1) and (2) are real limits, and they are narrow. Paragraph (1) takes the exemption away from an owner with an interest in more than three single-family dwellings, which describes a great many small landlords in a city of 37,555. Paragraph (2) speaks about sales, not lettings, and restricts a non-occupant owner to one sale in twenty-four months; how a court would read it against a rental was not researched for this page and is not something to guess at.

So the first question in Clovis is a counting question. How many houses does this owner have an interest in? Above three, § 28-1-9(A) is simply not his.

What the exemption exempts him from

Now read the four words the subsection opens with once more: “the Human Rights Act.”

That is the whole scope of § 28-1-9. It is an exemption from a New Mexico statute. It is not an exemption from the federal Fair Housing Act, which carries its own exemptions written on its own terms: a separate document, with separate thresholds, and nothing here establishes that the two lines fall in the same place.

Which matters more than it sounds, because the accommodation duty was never in the state act to begin with. § 28-1-7(J), the Human Rights Act’s only duty to accommodate a disability, is addressed to “any employer,” and § 28-1-2(V) and 9.1.1.7(X) NMAC both define the term “for employment purposes.” The requirement that a landlord make an exception to a no-pets rule comes from 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B). A landlord who successfully claims § 28-1-9(A) has removed the state forum and the state claim. He has not removed that.

Where a Clovis complaint would go

The state route runs through the Human Rights Bureau, which sits in the Labor Relations Division of the Department of Workforce Solutions and writes its procedure at 9.1.1 NMAC. Its filing window is 300 calendar days from the last alleged act, and the Bureau has no reachable public website: Housing New Mexico publishes its phone numbers, (800) 566-9471 and (505) 827-6838, on the state fair housing page.

Clovis is in the Eastern Regional Housing Authority’s territory and that authority has no working site, so the local links worth keeping are the City of Clovis and Curry County. One warning specific to this city: the domain that looks like the city’s is the Clovis/Curry County Chamber of Commerce, and the City’s own site is the .gov.

What survives an exemption

Everything above turns on facts about the landlord: how many houses, what the listing said, who lived there last. None of it is inside a tenant’s control.

The part that is inside your control is the first finding: that a disability exists and that this animal answers it. That finding is what the federal duty runs on, and it is what 9.1.1.8(F)(3) NMAC describes when it says evidence of a disability “may be provided by the written certification of a physician or other appropriate medical authority.”

Ask your own clinician first if you have one. It is the cheapest route and often the best, with two real catches: a provider who treats you for something else may decline to make a disability determination, and Curry County has few independent practices, with most of New Mexico’s specialist capacity concentrated far away in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Where that route is closed, a licensed evaluation is the same assessment, arranged deliberately: a licensed professional decides the question and writes down the answer, whichever way it goes.

New Mexico’s exemption lists eight classes and leaves yours out. The document that does not depend on that list is the one describing you.