Emotional Support Animal Letters in Reading, PA

Long Tenancies, One Overlooked Rule

Reading held about 96,000 residents in the 2024 Census Bureau estimate, and 59.4% of its households rent — roughly double Pennsylvania’s 30.7% statewide share, across nearly 20,000 renter households.

Tenancies here tend to run for years in the same rowhouse, renewing quietly. That pattern collides with a provision of Pennsylvania law almost nobody applies correctly.

Two Months, Then One

The Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 sets two different ceilings.

During the first year of a lease, a landlord may not require more than two months’ rent to be deposited in escrow for damages or default in rent.

During the second and subsequent years of the lease, or during any renewal of the original lease, the amount required to be deposited may not exceed one month’s rent.

Read together, those sentences mean a deposit that was perfectly lawful when collected becomes excessive the moment the tenancy passes its first anniversary — unless the landlord reduces it. In a market where tenants stay five and six years, that is a large amount of money sitting in escrow beyond what the statute permits.

A tenant in year three with two months’ rent still held has a claim that has nothing to do with animals, and it survives whether or not any accommodation was ever requested.

Thirty Days, and Double Damages

At the end of the tenancy the statute tightens again. Within thirty days of the lease terminating, the landlord must provide a written list of damages and return the difference between the escrowed sum and the actual damages.

A landlord who fails to do that is “liable in assumpsit to double the amount by which the sum deposited in escrow … exceeds the actual damages.” Double damages are unusual in landlord-tenant law and worth knowing about before accepting a silent forfeiture.

None of It Attaches to the Animal

An assistance animal that qualifies as a reasonable accommodation is not a pet. Pet deposits, pet fees and pet rent are terms that apply to pets, and they do not follow an approved accommodation into the tenancy.

What remains is ordinary responsibility for damage, assessed at move-out against the same standard applied to every other tenant in the building.

What Act 118 Permits a Landlord to Ask

Pennsylvania’s Assistance and Service Animal Integrity Act — Act 118 of 2018 — defines an assistance animal to include an emotional support animal that qualifies as a reasonable accommodation, and then limits the inquiry.

Under § 3(a), documentation of the disability and the disability-related need may be required in one case only: where that disability or need is not readily apparent to the housing provider and not otherwise known to it. Where a request is proper, § 3(b) requires the documentation to be in writing, to be reliable and based on direct knowledge, and to describe the disability-related need for the animal.

The profession of the writer is not part of the test. A counselor or other provider who has assessed the tenant and can speak to the need satisfies § 3(b) as readily as a physician would.

The Duty, and the Deadline

The obligation sits in § 5(h)(3.2) of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act. A provider that refuses an accommodation in rules, policies, practices or services acts unlawfully whenever that accommodation may be needed to give a person equal opportunity to use and enjoy a housing accommodation.

The deadline sits in § 9(h): a complaint must be filed with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission within 180 days after the alleged act of discrimination. Reading has no local commission offering a longer window, so that six-month period is all a tenant has.

For a long tenancy, that has a specific implication. A refusal in March is not revived by a renewal in September. The clock runs from the act complained of.

Requests Made Years Into a Tenancy

Nothing in Act 118 or the Human Relations Act makes a request weaker for being late. A tenant who has lived in the same unit for six years and needs an accommodation now asks on exactly the terms a new tenant would, and the documentation supplied now is what the request rests on.

Where a pet fee has been paid for years before anyone realized the animal qualified as an accommodation, the fee stops once the accommodation is approved. Whether anything already paid can be recovered is a question for a legal aid provider rather than an assumption to make unaided.

What a Refusal Should Be Made to Say

A verbal “no” is difficult to challenge and easy to revise later. Where a Reading landlord refuses, the useful next step is a short written note asking which element of the request is said to fail: whether the disability or need is considered readily apparent under § 3(a), or whether the documentation is said not to meet § 3(b).

The answer is worth having in writing whatever it says. It either narrows the disagreement to something fixable or produces the clearest evidence a complaint could have.

The Home Is What Is Covered

Act 118 defines a service animal by reference to the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act, and defines an assistance animal separately as one qualifying as a reasonable accommodation — expressly including an emotional support animal on that basis.

What a Reading tenant secures under § 5(h)(3.2) is the ability to keep the animal at home without pet charges. Entry to shops or restaurants is governed elsewhere, and conflating the two gives a landlord an argument that was never part of the request.

Screening, Then the Request

Nothing requires an applicant in Reading to raise an assistance animal during screening, and a disability is not a proper screening criterion. Applying on the ordinary terms and making the accommodation request in writing after approval keeps the two decisions apart, and settles the charge question before anything is signed. In a market where the same landlord may hold a unit for years, that early written exchange is also the document a tenant will still have in year four.

The Federal Track

The federal Fair Housing Act independently requires reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices or services where necessary to afford a person with a disability equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling, a duty implemented by regulation at 24 C.F.R. § 100.204. Given Pennsylvania’s short state deadline, it is worth asking a legal aid provider early which route fits.

Local Help in Berks County

MidPenn Legal Services provides free civil legal services across eighteen central Pennsylvania counties including Berks. The Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network — a statewide consortium covering all sixty-seven counties — can identify the right provider if a matter falls outside MidPenn’s remit, and Disability Rights Pennsylvania is the state’s protection and advocacy organization.

Two claims often travel together in Reading: an accommodation complaint to the Human Relations Commission, and a deposit claim under the Landlord and Tenant Act. They go to different places and have different deadlines, so it is worth naming them separately from the start. Our guide to what a landlord can and cannot do explains how a refusal is judged, and the Pennsylvania ESA law overview sets out the statewide rules.