Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Brookings, SD

Half the town rents, and most of it turns over in August

Brookings has 4,780 renting households out of 9,145 occupied homes, 52.3 percent on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate. That is more than twenty points above the 31.4 percent statewide figure and the second highest share of South Dakota’s twenty largest cities, behind Vermillion.

Median gross rent is $889, under the $946 state median despite everything South Dakota State University does to demand. The 2024 Census estimate puts the city at 24,555.

What the share does not capture is the shape of the market: large purpose-built blocks, per-bed leases, a nine-month cycle, and management companies that process hundreds of move-ins in a fortnight. Operators like that answer accommodation requests with a phrase that is genuinely in the statute, which is why answering it badly is so easy.

The phrase is real

SDCL 20-13-23.7, entire:

“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.”

That is South Dakota’s state-law accommodation duty for housing, and undue hardship is written into it. A tenant who responds “there is no such defence” is wrong, and has just conceded the argument on credibility.

Two things about the section’s placement, since a landlord may raise them. It sits among the public-accommodation provisions, and the words “or housing” look bolted on. They are — the 1986 act that inserted it put it there — but they are in the statute, and SDCL 20-13-35.1 confirms the point from the other side by naming 20-13-23.7 in the list of sections for which punitive damages may be awarded, and allowing attorneys’ fees and costs to the prevailing party “for housing matters.”

What undue hardship is, and what it is not

The defence attaches to the accommodation, in the singular. It is a conclusion about a particular request in a particular unit.

Things that could support it, if the landlord shows them: a documented cost the landlord would carry, a physical constraint of the specific unit, a demonstrable effect on other tenants that cannot be managed.

Things that are not it, however often they get said in a Brookings leasing office in August:

• “We do not allow animals.” That is the rule the accommodation is an exception to. Restating the rule is not a hardship analysis.
• “We would have to do it for everyone.” No: the duty is owed to people with a disability whose accommodation may be necessary, and that is not everyone. This sentence is a description of the duty, offered as a reason to escape it.
• “Our insurer prefers not to.” A preference is not a cost, and a landlord asserting an insurance consequence can be asked what it is.

A landlord who states undue hardship without having looked at your request has asserted it, not established it. Ask, politely and in writing, what about this accommodation in this unit is the hardship. The question is not rhetorical; the statute makes it the question.

The section that looks like a trump card and is not

A well-advised Brookings operator may reach for SDCL 20-13-21.1:

“Nothing in this chapter requires any person selling, renting, or leasing property … to modify the property in any way, incur any additional expenses or exercise a higher degree of care for a person having a disability than for a person who does not have a disability.”

Read next to 20-13-23.7 those two look like a contradiction, and the way to resolve it is in the session laws. SDCL 20-13-23.7 is section 4 of chapter 170 of the 1986 session laws. SDCL 20-13-21.1 is section 14 of that same chapter. One legislature, one bill.

So they were meant to be read together, and read together section 14 marks out three things the section 4 duty does not require. Waiving a no-pets clause is none of them: it changes a rule rather than the building, it costs the landlord nothing, and it asks for no heightened standard of care.

That is a textual reading, not a decided one, no South Dakota case construing the two against each other was read for this page. It is also, on the words, the reading that makes both sections do work.

And the federal floor, which does not have this problem

42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B). The Fair Housing Act’s reasonable-accommodation duty, applies to Brookings rentals on its own terms and is not narrowed by anything in SDCL 20-13. For most tenants it is the stronger of the two, and it is worth naming alongside the state provision rather than instead of it.

Money, per bed

The charges come off through SDCL 20-13-20(2), which makes disability discrimination in “the terms, conditions, or privileges” of a rental an unfair or discriminatory practice. In a per-bed market a monthly pet charge is often quoted per bed too, which changes the arithmetic and not the principle.

SDCL 43-32-6.1 caps the residential deposit at one month’s rent “however denominated,” and SDCL 43-32-24 requires it back, or written reasons, within twenty-one days of the tenancy ending, with the lessor forfeiting the whole right to withhold by missing that. On a nine-month lease ending in May, that deadline arrives while you are somewhere else, so give the address in writing.

The clock, on an academic calendar

SDCL 20-13-31 allows 180 days from the practice, with no discovery language. A refusal in September expires in March; a refusal in April expires after you have left town. Date the request and date the refusal, in writing, at the time.

Asking the hardship question in writing

If a Brookings operator answers with undue hardship, the useful reply is short and specific.

Ask what about this accommodation in this unit is the hardship. Ask it in writing, and keep the answer. A landlord who can identify a cost, a physical constraint or a demonstrable effect on other residents has made the case the statute contemplates. One who restates the pet policy has not, and the written record of that is worth having if a charge is ever filed.

Nothing in SDCL 20-13-23.7 obliges a landlord to explain themselves. But an undue-hardship assertion that has never been explained is a weak thing to rely on later, and most operators know it.

What has to be true first

If you already see a clinician (including through the university’s counselling service, if that relationship is a real clinical one), that is the strongest and cheapest place to start. They know your history, and they meet the source requirement in SDCL 43-32-35 without anyone having to think about it.

The friction is honest and specific here: campus services carry semester-long waitlists, they are configured for short-term counselling rather than for writing housing determinations, and a clinician who has seen you three times may reasonably decline to make a disability finding.

Where that route closes, a licensed evaluation is the same assessment arranged deliberately, someone licensed deciding whether a disability exists and whether this animal answers it, then writing the determination or explaining why they will not. Against a Brookings operator who is going to answer with the words “undue hardship,” the first thing that has to be unarguable is everything that comes before them.