Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Winston-Salem, NC

The city that files the lawsuit

Winston-Salem put research labs and biotech startups inside the brick buildings where it once cured tobacco and spun textiles, and Wake Forest University sits a short drive from the Innovation Quarter. For a renter with an emotional support animal, though, the local fact that matters is not economic. Winston-Salem does not merely investigate a housing discrimination complaint. In one situation it goes to court over it.

Section 38-117 of the city code deals with what happens after the director finds reasonable cause to believe you were discriminated against. The usual next step is an administrative hearing. A party may instead elect to have the claim heard in superior court, and where that election is exercised, the ordinance says “the city will commence and maintain such action on behalf of the complainant.”

Read that twice. A city department files the fair housing action in your name and keeps it going. Under the state statute an ordinary complainant reaches superior court by hiring counsel instead.

Twenty working days, and no web page tells you

Here is the catch, and it is unforgiving. The election has a window. Section 38-117 requires that the “decision must be submitted in writing to the human relations department within 20 working days of receipt of the director’s decision.”

Twenty working days is roughly four calendar weeks, and the count starts when the director’s decision reaches you, not when you get around to reading it. The section offers no way to revive the choice once the window shuts.

Now the part that catches people. The city’s fair housing page and its complaint-filing page both walk you through how to start a case. Neither one prints this deadline. Neither prints the one-year filing deadline either. Both rules live in Chapter 38 of the code and nowhere else the city publishes. So when a decision letter arrives, write the date on it that day.

One sentence sorts out whose office this is

Forsyth County settles the jurisdiction question more cleanly than most counties manage. Live “within the City Limits of Winston-Salem,” it says, and you contact the City of Winston-Salem Human Relations Department on 336-734-1227. Live in Forsyth County outside those limits and you are pointed to the Civil Rights Division of the Office of Administrative Hearings in Raleigh, on 984-236-1914.

So the county government takes none of these complaints itself. It sorts people by a line on a map.

That line carries real weight here. Under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 41A-7(c), when a unit of government has jurisdiction and “legal authority equivalent to or greater than” the State Fair Housing Act’s, the state Human Relations Commission “shall be divested of jurisdiction.” Winston-Salem is one of just five North Carolina localities certified by HUD to run its own fair housing program. Inside the city limits the local office is not a second option. It is the office.

Three ways in: the online inquiry form, that phone number, or the counter at City Hall, 101 N Main St, Suite 109. The department investigates claims of housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or family status. Disability is on the list. It notifies the party complained about, investigates, seeks a resolution, and sends what it cannot resolve “to a hearing board with subpoena power.”

Chapter 38 carries the duty itself

Winston-Salem did not simply borrow federal law. Section 38-106(b)(2) lists as discrimination:

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 a dwelling

The subsection before it, § 38-106(b)(1), handles physical modifications to the unit. Notice what (b)(2) regulates, not animals, but rules. Your lease’s no-pets clause is a rule. So is its breed list, its weight limit and its pet-fee schedule. Nothing in the provision asks what your animal is, how big it is, or what it was trained to do.

The identical duty appears in N.C. Gen. Stat. § 41A-4(f)(2) and in the federal regulation at 24 C.F.R. § 100.204. State law adds a useful edge: § 41A-5(a)(3) says in its entirety that “[a] person’s act or failure to act violates G.S. 41A-4(f).” No motive to prove.

A year to file, signed and sworn

The local filing deadline is in § 38-112(a). A person claiming to be aggrieved by a discriminatory practice (or that person’s agent, guardian or custodian, or a member of the commission) may file a “written, verified complaint with the commission within one year after the alleged violation occurred or terminated,” setting out the facts it rests on.

Two details do work there. Verified means signed and sworn, so leave time for that rather than discovering it on day 364. And the year runs from when the practice “occurred or terminated,” which matters when a refusal is an ongoing state of affairs rather than a single email.

Using the city process does not cost you court time

A fair worry about any local agency is that months spent inside it quietly eat your deadline for suing. Chapter 38 answers that in writing.

Section 38-118 gives one year for a private action and then adds that “[t]his time period does not include the time during which an administrative proceeding is being conducted.” It also allows a fresh year running from the effective date of a dismissal. Separately, § 38-112(b) provides that a finding of no reasonable cause “shall not preclude the aggrieved person’s private right of action.”

The article also leaves you free: no requirement to file anywhere else in parallel, no bar on having filed elsewhere, and § 38-103(a) is a plain non-repeal clause. The whole fair housing law runs from § 38-101 to § 38-118, in Chapter 38, Article IV: an odd address, since that chapter is titled Miscellaneous Offenses and Provisions.

Where the money argument is won

Winston-Salem landlords price animals the way landlords do across this state: a nonrefundable pet fee, monthly pet rent, sometimes a separate pet deposit, plus a breed and weight schedule. North Carolina is not neutral here. Section 42-53 expressly permits “a reasonable, nonrefundable fee for pets,” and no statute limits pet rent at all.

Which means arguing that the charge is unreasonable is the losing road. The argument that works is about categories, not amounts. Every one of those charges is written for a pet. An animal you keep because of a disability, approved as an accommodation, is not being kept as a pet, so the pricing has nothing to attach to, and the breed and weight rules are policies, which is precisely what § 38-106(b)(2) requires an exception to.

Damage survives all of it. Whatever your animal genuinely damages, you owe for, and the landlord may take it from the security deposit, capped by § 42-51(b) at two months’ rent on a term longer than month to month, or one and a half months’ rent month to month.

The chapter that mentions renting and still misses you

At some point somebody will email you § 168-4.4, which says a person with a disability accompanied by a service animal “may not be required to pay any extra compensation for the animal.” Its neighbour, § 168-4.2, grants the right to keep that animal “on any premises the person leases, rents, or uses.” Rented premises, no charge: apparently case closed.

It closes on somebody else. Section 168-4.2 gives those rights to a person with “a service animal trained to assist the person with his or her specific disability.” An emotional support animal works by being there, not by performing a trained task, so Chapter 168 passes over it. The free state tag under § 168-4.3 is the same story: real, no charge, optional even for the service animals it covers, and issued only for an animal trained or in training, which an ESA is not. A landlord quoting those sections has read them correctly. They are simply not the provision you rely on.

Forty-four percent of the city rents. Here is what to send.

Of 103,058 occupied homes in Winston-Salem, 45,767 are rented: 44.4%, well above the statewide 33.4%, on Census Bureau five-year estimates covering 2020 through 2024. With 255,769 residents this is North Carolina’s fifth-largest city.

Put the request in writing first. One page does it: you have a disability, the animal helps with it, and you are asking for the building’s pet rules to be set aside as a reasonable accommodation. Attach documentation from a licensed professional who has actually assessed you. A current letter from someone who knows your situation is what an investigator can act on. Anything sold online as a registration or certificate is worth nothing in this state.

If the answer is no, call 336-734-1227, or use the online inquiry form, or walk into Suite 109. For free civil legal help, Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Winston-Salem office is at 102 W 3rd St, Suite 460, (336) 725-9162, covering Davie, Forsyth, Iredell, Stokes, Surry and Yadkin counties.