Emotional Support Animal Letters in Lancaster, PA

A Renter-Majority City

Lancaster counted about 58,441 residents in the 2024 Census Bureau estimate, and 51.4% of its households rent — well above Pennsylvania’s 30.7% statewide share, across roughly 11,300 renter households.

Tenants here, like tenants everywhere, meet landlords who want something official-looking before they will say yes. The market has an answer ready: vests, harnesses, laminated cards, registry certificates. In Pennsylvania that answer is worse than useless.

Two Offenses, Two Grades

The Assistance and Service Animal Integrity Act — Act 118 of 2018 — criminalizes both halves of the problem, at different levels.

Section 5 covers the claim. A misdemeanor of the third degree is what the statute grades two things as: an intentional misrepresentation that a person is entitled to an assistance or service animal, and a materially false statement made in order to obtain documentation.

Section 6 covers the props. Here the grade drops to a summary offense and the penalty is a fine not to exceed $1,000 — imposed for falsifying a document, for making a false statement, or for putting on an animal that does not qualify the harness, collar, vest or sign that assistance and service animals wear.

That second provision is unusual. Most states that legislate in this area punish the false claim; Pennsylvania also legislates against the costume.

What Neither Provision Touches

Both turn on intent. A tenant who describes the animal accurately, and who submits a letter from someone who has actually assessed them, is doing what the statute contemplates rather than what it penalizes. Nothing in Act 118 makes an ordinary accommodation request risky.

The distinction is worth holding onto because landlords occasionally invoke the criminal provisions as a general deterrent — as though asking at all were suspect. It is not. The offenses target falsification, and a request supported by real documentation is the opposite of that.

What a Real Request Looks Like

Section 3(b) tells a tenant exactly what to produce: documentation in writing, reliable and based on direct knowledge, describing the disability-related need for the animal.

No credential appears in that list, because Pennsylvania does not issue one. There is no state ESA registry, no state certificate, and no state agency in the business of endorsing an animal. What exists is a letter from someone who knows the situation.

And under § 3(a), even that is required only where the disability or the disability-related need is not readily apparent or known to the provider.

The Duty and the Deadline

The obligation is in § 5(h)(3.2) of the Human Relations Act. Reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices or services cannot lawfully be refused where they are necessary to afford equal opportunity to use and enjoy a housing accommodation.

The deadline is in § 9(h): a complaint must reach the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission within 180 days after the alleged act of discrimination. Lancaster has no city commission offering a longer window, so six months is the entire runway.

What an Approved Animal Costs

An approved assistance animal is not a pet, so pet rent, pet fees and pet deposits do not apply to it. The general deposit ceiling set by the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 is two months’ rent for a lease’s first year and one month’s rent thereafter; the damages list and the balance are owed inside thirty days of the tenant vacating.

When a Landlord Insists on a Certificate

The awkward case is a landlord acting in good faith who simply believes credentials exist. Arguing about the vest trade rarely helps; supplying the statute does.

Section 3(b) describes what documentation must be — in writing, reliable and based on direct knowledge, describing the disability-related need — and nothing in Act 118 mentions certification, registration, or training as a condition of an assistance animal. Pointing at the subsection and asking which part is unmet moves the exchange from what a landlord imagines the law requires to what it actually says.

Housing Rights, Not Public Access

The two categories in Act 118 do different jobs. A service animal is defined by reference to the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Human Relations Act; an assistance animal is the accommodation category, and it expressly includes an emotional support animal that qualifies as a reasonable accommodation.

What follows for a Lancaster tenant is that the request concerns the home. A restaurant on Prince Street may decline the animal at its door without any conflict with the housing rules, and a landlord who raises that fact in response to a housing request has changed the subject.

The Remedy Behind the Deposit Rules

An approved assistance animal carries no charge, but the tenancy’s ordinary deposit rules still apply. Two months’ rent is the first-year ceiling under the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951, and one month’s rent the ceiling in the second year and after. Where the itemisation and the balance do not reach the tenant within thirty days of vacating, the statute makes the landlord liable in assumpsit to double the amount wrongfully withheld.

If the Request Is Simply Ignored

Act 118 imposes no deadline on the provider’s answer, so a request can sit unanswered for months without ever becoming a refusal anybody wrote down. The counter is a dated written follow-up at a fixed interval, which converts silence into a documented sequence — and it matters here because the 180-day period runs from the discriminatory act rather than from the day a tenant gives up waiting.

Federal Law Runs Alongside

HUD’s regulation at 24 C.F.R. § 100.204 independently makes it unlawful to refuse reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services where they may be necessary to afford a person with a handicap equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling unit. A Lancaster tenant has that footing whether or not the state analysis is contested.

Timing

Act 118 imposes no deadline on the tenant, so a request may be made before signing, at signing, or well into a tenancy. Before signing is simply tidier, because no animal charge has yet been written into a document that would then need amending. A request made later is assessed on the same documentation.

Narrowing a Refusal

Where a Lancaster landlord says no, the next step is narrow rather than adversarial: ask in writing which element of the request is said to fail. Either the disability or need is considered readily apparent — in which case no documentation was required at all — or the documentation is said to miss § 3(b).

Both answers are useful. One resolves the request; the other becomes the written explanation a complaint would otherwise have to reconstruct.

None of this requires a lawyer to begin. A written request, a letter that meets § 3(b), and a note of the date cover the ground that matters, and they cost nothing to produce.

Legal Help in Lancaster County

MidPenn Legal Services provides free civil legal services across eighteen central Pennsylvania counties, Lancaster among them. Disability Rights Pennsylvania is the state’s protection and advocacy organization, and the Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network keeps a directory of providers by county.

If a landlord asks for proof that does not exist, the productive reply is to supply what § 3(b) does describe and to ask, in writing, which element of the request they consider unmet. Our guide to what a landlord can and cannot do explains how a refusal is weighed, and the Pennsylvania ESA law overview collects the statewide rules.