Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Box Elder, SD

The most expensive rental market in South Dakota is not Sioux Falls

Box Elder’s median gross rent is $1,491 on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate. Rapid City, next door, is $1,109. Sioux Falls is $1,035. The state median is $946.

That makes Box Elder the highest-rent city in South Dakota by a wide margin, about fifty-eight percent above the state figure, and the fact surprises almost everyone, because Box Elder is the ninth largest place in the state at 13,887 people on the 2024 Census estimate.

It is also one of the most renter-heavy: 2,422 of 4,679 occupied homes are rented, 51.8 percent, third of the state’s twenty largest cities behind Vermillion and Brookings.

Both numbers have the same explanation. Box Elder adjoins Ellsworth Air Force Base. Its housing market is built around short tenancies, arriving households who need somewhere immediately, and demand that does not soften.

Which is why the deposit cap is worth reading carefully here

SDCL 43-32-6.1:

“Any deposit of money, the function of which is to secure the performance of a residential rental agreement or any part of such an agreement, shall be deemed to be a security deposit. A lessor of residential premises may not demand or receive a security deposit, however denominated, in an amount or value in excess of one month’s rent except that a larger deposit may be agreed upon between the lessor and the lessee where special conditions pose a danger to maintenance of the premises.”

Everywhere in South Dakota the cap is one month’s rent. In Aberdeen that is $762. In Box Elder it is close to $1,500, and a landlord who wants a deposit plus a pet charge is reaching past a number that already matters.

So the exception at the end of the sentence gets more use in this city than anywhere else in the state. It should get less.

Two conditions, and both are required

Read the exception as the statute wrote it:

1. The larger deposit may be agreed upon between the lessor and the lessee.
2. Where special conditions pose a danger to maintenance of the premises.

The first is agreement. Not a term inserted into a standard lease and presented at signing as non-negotiable. The section says “agreed upon between,” which contemplates two parties reaching something.

The second is the substantive one, and it is a description of a circumstance, not of an animal. “Special conditions” that “pose a danger to maintenance of the premises” is language about the state of the property or the use being made of it. Nothing in chapter 43-32 defines an ordinary household animal as a special condition, and reading one in would swallow the cap: every pet would carry an exception, which is not what an exception is for.

And the prior question, which comes first

None of that decides whether the charge should exist. For an assistance animal that is a genuine accommodation, it should not.

South Dakota has no statute barring a pet fee in terms. The charge comes off under SDCL 20-13-20(2), which makes it an unfair or discriminatory practice to discriminate because of disability in “the terms, conditions, or privileges” of a rental, and under 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B), the federal Fair Housing Act’s reasonable-accommodation duty. The state duty in SDCL 20-13-23.7 requires good faith efforts to reasonably accommodate a disabled person in housing unless the accommodation would impose undue hardship.

Keep the two levels apart. 20-13-20(2) says the charge should not be made. 43-32-6.1 says that even where a charge is lawful, everything the landlord holds counts against the same one-month ceiling, labels included.

Fast turnover, and the deadline it creates

Box Elder tenancies end abruptly and often end with a move out of state. SDCL 43-32-24 sets the rules:

• Twenty-one days from termination and receipt of the tenant’s mailing address or delivery instructions, for return of the deposit or a written statement of the specific reason for withholding.
• Forty-five days, on request, for an itemised accounting.
• Withholding limited to remedying defaults in rent and other funds due, and restoring the premises to their condition at the start of the tenancy, ordinary wear and tear excepted.
• A lessor who fails to comply “forfeits all rights to withhold any portion of the deposit.”

The clock does not start until the landlord has an address. A tenant who leaves for a new assignment without giving one in writing has not started the twenty-one days, and at Box Elder deposit sizes that is an expensive omission.

What this page does not cover

Housing on the installation itself is a different arrangement with its own process. No South Dakota statute retrieved for this material speaks to it, and nothing here should be read as describing it. What is described above is the private rental market in the City of Box Elder, which is where most of the demand lands.

If the accommodation is refused

SDCL 20-13-31 allows 180 days from when the practice occurred, with no discovery language in the section, filed with the Division of Human Rights in the Department of Labor and Regulation. For a household that may relocate inside that window, the date of the refusal is fixed and absence does not extend it, put the request and the refusal in writing at the time.

Arriving with the request already made

In a market where households sign leases before they have seen the town, the sequence matters.

An accommodation can be requested at application, not only after moving in. Doing it then avoids the awkward position of having agreed a pet deposit in the lease and asking for it back afterwards, which is a harder conversation than declining to agree it in the first place.

It also puts the documentation question in front of you early, while there is still time to sort out a clinician, rather than in week two of a tenancy with a charge already running.

And keep the paperwork portable. A determination obtained for one Box Elder tenancy is the same determination at the next address, here or elsewhere. Households that move often lose more requests to lost documents than to landlords.

The step that has to happen first

Start with a clinician who already sees you. For a household that has moved recently that is a harder sentence than it looks: continuity of care across a move is exactly what arriving families do not have, records take time to transfer, and a new clinician who has seen you twice may reasonably decline to make a disability finding yet. West River capacity is concentrated in Rapid City, and new-patient waits there run to months.

Where that route is not open, a licensed evaluation is the same examination arranged on purpose, someone licensed settling whether a disability exists and whether this animal answers it, then writing the determination or explaining that they cannot. Both endings are real, and a service whose answer is settled before you arrive is the operation SDCL 43-32-35 was drafted to exclude.

In the state’s most expensive rental market, that document is what stands between a required accommodation and a lawful charge on the highest rent in South Dakota.