Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Dell Rapids, SD

Two hundred and seventy-five rented homes

Dell Rapids has 275 renting households out of 1,551 occupied homes, 17.7 percent on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate. That is the lowest renter share of any of South Dakota’s twenty largest cities, against a statewide figure of 31.4 percent.

Median gross rent is $962, sixteen dollars above the state median, which is high for a market this thin. The 2024 Census estimate puts the city at 3,825 people, twentieth of the state’s largest municipalities, about twenty miles north of Sioux Falls.

Two hundred and seventy-five rentals means almost no professional management. It means individual owners: someone with a house they used to live in, someone with the upstairs of a building on Fourth Street, someone with a duplex. And it means the first question in any accommodation dispute here is one that rarely comes up in Sioux Falls, whether the South Dakota act reaches this landlord at all.

The exemption, in full

At the end of SDCL 20-13-20:

“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 conditions, both required:

1. The dwelling contains living quarters for no more than two families.
2. The owner maintains and occupies one of them as their residence.

Working through the Dell Rapids cases

A duplex where the owner lives in one half. Two families, owner in residence. Inside the exemption.

A house divided into three flats, owner in one. Three families. Outside: the exemption’s ceiling is two, and one over is one too many.

An owner with two rental houses who lives in a third. Outside. The exemption is about “rooms or units in dwellings … if the owner maintains and occupies one of the living quarters.” A rental house the owner does not live in is not a unit in the dwelling they occupy.

An owner with a single rental house, living across town. Outside. This is the one that surprises people, because it feels like the smallest possible landlord. South Dakota has no small-landlord exemption based on the number of properties owned. The state exemption is about owner-occupancy, and nothing else.

That last point is worth holding onto, because two neighbouring states do have a number-of-properties exemption. Kansas exempts a single family house sold or rented by an owner “who does not own or have any interest in more than three single family houses at any one time,” where no broker is used, under K.S.A. 44-1018(b)(1). And Kansas’s owner-occupied threshold is four families rather than two. South Dakota’s is the narrowest of the three states in this region.

What the exemption switches off, and what stays

It is written against subdivisions (1), (2), and (4): refusing to rent because of disability, discriminating in the terms, conditions or privileges of the rental, and refusing reasonable modifications at the disabled person’s expense.

Nothing is said about subdivision (3). That subdivision covers advertising: publicising, in any manner at all, that a would-be tenant with a disability would be “unwelcome, objectionable, not acceptable, or not solicited.” It binds an exempt owner-occupier exactly as it binds anyone else.

The step nobody should skip

If the state exemption does apply, that is not the end of the enquiry. It is an exemption from the South Dakota section.

The federal Fair Housing Act has its own exemptions, drawn differently, and 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B)’s reasonable-accommodation duty is a federal obligation that does not depend on SDCL 20-13-20 at all. The two schemes do not line up, and a landlord outside one may be inside the other.

So the correct sequence when a Dell Rapids owner says the law does not apply to them is: how many families does the dwelling hold, do you live in one of them, and what about the federal Act.

And the documentation chapter has no exemption whatsoever

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

In a town of 3,800 that exception is genuinely live. Someone who has rented to you for six years, and knows why the animal is there, may already know within the meaning of the section. It is worth saying, politely, before producing anything.

What a market this small actually means

Moving is not the answer here. With 275 rentals in the city and the lowest renter share in the state’s top twenty, there is no realistic alternative unit to sign. Sioux Falls has 34,786 rentals and is twenty miles and an entirely different rent away.

That changes what a good outcome looks like. In a large market a refusal is a reason to look elsewhere; in Dell Rapids the accommodation you obtain in the unit you already have is very likely the whole result. Which puts the weight on the quality of the request rather than on what happens if it fails.

The rest of it

Charges attached to the animal come off under SDCL 20-13-20(2), where the section applies, and under the federal Act. Whatever the landlord holds is capped by SDCL 43-32-6.1 at one month’s rent, “however denominated.” Under SDCL 43-32-24 the money or a written explanation is due twenty-one days after the tenancy ends and your address reaches them, and a lessor who misses that loses the right to hold back anything at all. SDCL 20-13-31 gives 180 days from a refusal, with no discovery language, and time spent working out whether an exemption applies counts against that window like any other.

Asking about the building without making it an interrogation

The exemption question has to be answered, and it does not have to be asked adversarially.

“How many units are in the building, and do you live in one of them?” is a question with an ordinary answer, and most owners give it without thinking about statutes at all.

What that answer does is tell you which conversation you are in. Inside the exemption, the state section is off and the federal Act is the live question. Outside it, SDCL 20-13-20(2) applies to the charge and SDCL 20-13-23.7 to the refusal. Either way the documentation is the same, which is why it is worth having before the question is asked.

What works on an individual

Start with a clinician you already see. Most Dell Rapids residents’ care runs through Sioux Falls: the deepest clinical bench in South Dakota, and still two to four months for a new patient, with several large practices declining housing documentation as standing policy.

If that is not available, a licensed evaluation covers the same ground deliberately, a licensed clinician resolves the two questions and then either records the conclusion or tells you they will not. The second outcome is what makes the first mean anything.

Against a landlord who may genuinely be exempt from part of the state act, the argument that does the most work is the one that never needed the statute: a real document, a reasonable request, and a neighbour who has no good reason to refuse.