Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Brandon, SD

Eight hundred rentals in a town of eleven thousand

Brandon has 809 renting households out of 4,072 occupied homes, 19.9 percent on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate. That is nineteenth of South Dakota’s twenty largest cities by share, and less than two-thirds of the 31.4 percent statewide figure.

Median gross rent is $976, thirty dollars above the state median despite how few rentals there are. The 2024 Census estimate puts the city at 10,837, thirteenth in the state.

Eleven miles east of Sioux Falls, Brandon is a commuter town, and its rental stock looks like one: single houses let out, basement apartments, a duplex here and there, and a landlord who is often in the building. Which makes one clause of SDCL 20-13-20 the live question rather than a footnote.

The clause

At the end of SDCL 20-13-20, after the four subdivisions:

“The provisions of subdivisions (1), (2), and (4) do not apply to rooms or units in dwellings that contain living quarters for no more than two families living independently of each other, if the owner maintains and occupies one of the living quarters as the owner’s residence.”

Two families. Owner in residence. Both conditions, and the ceiling is two.

That is the narrowest owner-occupied exemption in this corpus. Kansas exempts buildings “occupied or intended to be occupied by no more than four families” where the owner occupies one, under K.S.A. 44-1018(b)(2). Montana’s MCA 49-2-305(2) covers the rental of sleeping rooms in an owner-occupied single-family residence renting no more than three rooms. South Dakota stops at two.

So the arithmetic in Brandon is unusually simple, and unusually often against the landlord who invokes it:

• Owner lives in half a duplex, rents the other half. Two families. Exempt from (1), (2) and (4).
• Owner lives in a fourplex and rents the other three units. Four families. Not exempt. The building is twice the size the clause allows.
• Owner lives in one house and rents out a second house down the street. The clause is about “rooms or units in dwellings … if the owner maintains and occupies one of the living quarters.” A separate rental house is not a unit in the dwelling the owner occupies.

A Brandon landlord saying “I live here, the law doesn’t apply to me” is stating a rule that exists. Whether it reaches their building is a question of counting.

What the exemption switches off, and what it leaves on

It is written against subdivisions (1), (2), and (4):

• (1) refusing to rent because of disability,
• (2) discriminating in the terms, conditions or privileges of the rental,
• (4) refusing to permit reasonable modifications at the disabled person’s expense.

Subdivision (3) is not in the list. That is the advertising provision, indicating or publicising in any manner that a rental by persons of a particular disability status is “unwelcome, objectionable, not acceptable, or not solicited.” An exempt owner-occupier still may not advertise that way.

And SDCL 20-13-23.7 does not carry the clause

The exemption sentence lives in SDCL 20-13-20 and is written against that section’s own subdivisions. The state accommodation duty is somewhere else:

“For purposes of employment, public accommodation, public service, and education or housing, good faith efforts shall be made to reasonably accommodate the disabled person unless the accommodation would impose undue hardship.”, SDCL 20-13-23.7

There is no owner-occupied carve-out on the face of that section. Whether a court would read one across is a question no South Dakota case retrieved for this page answers, so treat that as what the text says rather than as a settled position, but do not assume the 20-13-20 exemption disposes of 20-13-23.7 either, because it does not say so.

The federal question is separate and has to be asked separately

This is the part that most often gets skipped. An exemption in SDCL 20-13-20 is an exemption from that South Dakota section. The federal Fair Housing Act runs its own exemptions, drawn differently, and 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B)’s reasonable-accommodation duty is a federal obligation.

So when a Brandon owner-occupier claims the state exemption, the correct next question is not “are you sure” but “and what about the federal Act.” Those are two enquiries, and the second one is where a great many small-landlord situations actually land.

Documentation is a different chapter, with no exemption in it

SDCL 43-32-34 sits in the landlord-tenant chapter, not the human rights chapter, and carries no owner-occupied clause at all. It permits any landlord to require reliable supporting documentation where a tenant asserts a disability requiring an assistance animal, and bars the request where the disability or the disability-related need is “readily apparent or already known to the landlord.”

In a town of eleven thousand where the landlord lives downstairs, that second exception is not theoretical. Someone who has shared a building with you for four years may well already know. It is worth saying, politely, before producing paperwork.

And what the documentation has to be

If it is required: SDCL 43-32-35 wants it to confirm the disability, confirm the relationship between the disability and the need for the animal, and come from a licensed health care provider “who does not operate in this state solely to provide certification for service or assistance animals.”

The practical point about a market this small

With 809 rentals in the whole city, moving is not a realistic answer to a refusal in Brandon. Sioux Falls is eleven miles away and has 34,786 rentals, but it is a different town, a different commute and a different rent.

That asymmetry is worth naming because it changes what a good outcome looks like. In Sioux Falls a bad landlord is a reason to look elsewhere. In Brandon the accommodation you get in the unit you are in is very likely the whole of the result.

Counting the units, carefully

The exemption turns on how many families the dwelling holds, not on how many the landlord rents to.

An owner living in one half of a duplex and renting the other rents to one family and the dwelling holds two. Inside.

An owner living in one unit of a fourplex and renting only two of the other three still occupies a dwelling with living quarters for four families. Outside, and the empty unit does not help them.

Read the clause as a description of the building. That is how it is written, and it is the reading that decides most Brandon cases.

Which is why the assessment goes first

Start with a clinician you already see. They meet the source requirement automatically and can speak from history rather than from a single appointment. Most Brandon residents’ clinical care is in Sioux Falls, which helps with capacity and does not remove the wait: two to four months for a new patient is ordinary, and some practices decline housing documentation as policy.

Where that is closed, a licensed evaluation is the same examination arranged on purpose, someone licensed deciding whether a disability exists and whether this animal answers it, then setting the determination down or explaining why they will not.

In a duplex where the exemption may genuinely apply to the state section, the strength of the documentation and the reasonableness of the request are doing more work than any citation. Bring the thing that works on a person, not the thing that works in a filing.