Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in New Town, ND

Two thirds of a town, renting

New Town is one of the most renter-heavy places in North Dakota, and the figure is solid enough to say out loud. Of its 980 occupied homes, 663 are rented: 67.7 percent on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate, second only to Watford City’s 70.7 percent among the state’s twenty largest cities, and nearly twice the 37.1 percent statewide share. The 2024 Census estimate puts the Mountrail County city at 2,735 people, eighteenth of the twenty. Median gross rent is $851, a bit over a hundred dollars under the $954 North Dakota median.

Where two thirds of households rent, deposit rules stop being abstract. And North Dakota’s deposit rule for assistance animals is unusually generous, which is exactly why the part it does not cover deserves a page of its own.

What subsection 2 takes away

NDCC 47-16-07.1(2) is short and it does its work by description rather than by argument:

“A lessor may charge a lessee a pet security deposit for keeping an animal that is not a service animal or companion animal required by a tenant with a disability as a reasonable accommodation under fair housing laws. A pet security deposit may not exceed the greater of two thousand five hundred dollars or an amount equivalent to two months’ rent.”

Read what the permission is limited to. A lessor may charge the pet security deposit for an animal of a particular kind. One that is not an accommodation animal. An assistance animal supported by documentation under NDCC 47-16-07.5 is the animal the sentence carves out, so the permission never reaches it.

At New Town’s median that is real money. Two months’ rent is about $1,702, so the statutory ceiling for a pet deposit here would be the greater figure, $2,500. Subsection 2 means a tenant with an accommodation animal is not asked for any of it at move-in.

What subsection 3 leaves exactly where it was

Now the sentence people skip. Three subsections down, the same statute lists what a lessor may take out of a security deposit when the lease ends:

“3. A lessor may apply security deposit money and accrued interest upon termination of a lease towards: a. Any damages the lessor has suffered by reason of deteriorations or injuries to the real property or dwelling by the lessee’s pet or through the negligence of the lessee or the lessee’s guest. b. Any unpaid rent. c. The costs of cleaning or other repairs which were the responsibility of the lessee, and which are necessary to return the dwelling unit to its original state when the lessee took possession, reasonable wear and tear excepted.”

Nothing in that list is switched off by subsection 2. The carve-out removed a charge collected in advance, on the theory that an animal might cause damage. It did not remove the consequence of damage that actually happens.

So the honest account of a New Town tenancy with an assistance animal looks like this. You do not pay a pet deposit. You do pay the ordinary security deposit, capped at one month’s rent under 47-16-07.1(1). If the animal ruins a floor, the cost of the floor can come out of that ordinary deposit, and if it exceeds the deposit, being an accommodation animal does not make the balance disappear. No North Dakota provision retrieved for this material makes a tenant unaccountable for harm an assistance animal actually does.

That is not a weakness in the law. It is the trade that makes the rest of it defensible: the landlord gives up the pre-emptive charge and keeps the remedy for the real one.

The two protections that come with it

The same section gives a tenant something back, and both parts are worth knowing before a lease ends rather than after.

The first is an accounting. Any part of a deposit not returned “must be itemized by the lessor,” and the itemization and the amount due must be delivered or mailed to the last address the tenant gave, with written notice, within thirty days after termination of the lease and delivery of possession. A lump sum with no breakdown does not meet that.

The second is a consequence. NDCC 47-16-07.1(4) makes a lessor “liable for treble damages for any security deposit money withheld without reasonable justification.” Read together, the pair says: show your work, and be right about it.

One more boundary belongs here for completeness. NDCC 14-02.5-06(6) provides that the accommodation duty “does not require a dwelling to be made available to an individual whose tenancy would constitute a direct threat to the health or safety of other individuals whose tenancy would result in substantial physical damage to the property of others.” That is about a specific, evidenced risk from a specific animal, not a general anxiety about pets, and not a reason to charge a fee in advance.

Wear and tear is not damage

The statutory phrase is “reasonable wear and tear excepted,” and North Dakota does not define the line any further in the retrieved text. Practically, that puts the burden of characterisation on the itemization. Carpet at the end of a five-year tenancy wears out whether or not a dog lived on it; a chewed door frame does not.

Photographs at move-in and move-out are worth more here than any argument about the statute, because the disagreement that actually happens is factual rather than legal.

Why any of this needs the documentation at all

Every sentence above turns on one thing: that the animal is a service animal or companion animal required by a tenant with a disability as a reasonable accommodation. That is the status subsection 2 keys off, and status is not self-declared into existence. It comes from what NDCC 47-16-07.5 describes, documentation from a physician or medical professional confirming the tenant’s disability and the relationship between that disability and the need for the accommodation.

Two findings, and neither one is about the animal’s behaviour. That is the piece a lot of readers get backwards: the letter establishes why the animal is in the home, not that it will never break anything. A landlord’s protection against breakage is subsection 3, and it is intact.

What has to happen before the file exists

A clinician already treating you is the best starting point, and the cheapest. Someone with a history with you can address both findings from what they already know, and nothing else in this process is as strong.

The friction around New Town is worth naming rather than glossing. Mountrail County has very few independent practices; North Dakota’s specialist mental-health capacity is concentrated in Minot, Bismarck, Fargo and Grand Forks, and the nearest of those is a drive rather than an errand. Waits run long. And a clinician who has seen you a couple of times may properly decline to make a disability finding rather than sign one they cannot support.

Where that is the situation, a licensed evaluation is the same two findings sought on purpose: a licensed professional works out whether a disability exists, works out whether this animal answers it, and writes down what they concluded, including when the conclusion is no. An outfit that has already decided the answer is selling paper, and 47-16-07.5’s exclusion clause was written with that trade in mind.

Here is the honest summary a New Town tenant should leave with. Properly documented, the animal costs you nothing at move-in. It does not cost you nothing if it destroys something. Those two sentences are both true, and a page that gives you only the first one is not doing you a favour.