Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Harrisburg, SD

South Dakota’s second-highest rents, in a town of ten thousand

Harrisburg’s median gross rent is $1,362 on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate. Only Box Elder ($1,491) is higher. Sioux Falls, twelve miles north, is $1,035; the state median is $946.

The renter share tells the other half of the story: 649 renting households out of 3,008 occupied homes, 21.6 percent, seventeenth of the state’s twenty largest cities and ten points under the statewide figure. The 2024 Census estimate puts the city at 10,203.

Harrisburg is new housing built for the Sioux Falls commute. High rents, few rentals, recently built stock, and landlords who tend to be organised, which is why the refusal that shows up here is usually not “no,” but “no, and here is the section.”

The section they quote

SDCL 20-13-21.1, catchline “Housing — Modifications on behalf of disabled persons unnecessary”:

“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. Nor does this chapter relieve any person of any obligations generally imposed on all persons, regardless of any disability, in a written lease, rental agreement or contract of purchase or sale…”

Read quickly, that sounds like a general release: nothing in the chapter requires anything extra for a disabled person.

Read as written, it is a list of three things, and the list is the whole of it. Modify the property. Incur additional expenses. Exercise a higher degree of care.

What a no-pets waiver actually asks for

Put your request next to the three items.

• Does it modify the property? No. The building is untouched. What changes is a provision in the lease.
• Does it require additional expense? No. Not charging a pet fee is the absence of income, not an outlay, and the landlord’s costs are unaltered.
• Does it require a higher degree of care? No. You are not asking to be looked after differently from any other tenant; you are asking for an exception to one rule.

An accommodation of this kind is outside all three. That is the argument, and it is short because the section is short.

Why the two sections are not in conflict

A landlord may push back that SDCL 20-13-21.1 and SDCL 20-13-23.7 cannot both be law. That one says accommodate and the other says nothing extra is required.

They can, and the session-law citations show why. Look at where each came from:

• SDCL 20-13-23.7, the accommodation duty, is SL 1986, ch 170, § 4.
• SDCL 20-13-21.1 (the “nothing requires” section) is SL 1986, ch 170, § 14.

Same year. Same chapter. Same bill, ten sections apart.

A legislature that intended section 14 to cancel section 4 would not have enacted them together in one act. The reading that gives both work is the ordinary one: section 4 imposes a good-faith duty to reasonably accommodate, and section 14 marks out three things that duty does not reach.

Say this carefully. No South Dakota case construing the two against each other was retrieved for this page. It is a textual reading, not a decided one.

What supports it from inside the code is the remedies section. SDCL 20-13-35.1 provides that punitive damages may be awarded under SDCL 21-3-2 for a violation of, among others, 20-13-23.7, and permits attorneys’ fees and costs to the prevailing party in housing matters. A legislature does not attach punitive damages to a section that requires nothing of anyone.

What section 14 does cover

It is not empty. On its words it answers requests to alter the property, requests that cost the landlord money, and requests for a heightened standard of care.

The first of those is dealt with expressly elsewhere in the same chapter. SDCL 20-13-20(4) makes it an unfair or discriminatory practice to refuse to permit, “at the expense of the disabled person,” reasonable modifications of existing property necessary to afford full enjoyment of it, and lets a landlord condition permission on restoration afterwards where reasonable. So modifications are allowed and paid for by the tenant, which is exactly the allocation section 14 describes.

And the provision that has none of this difficulty

42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B) (the federal Fair Housing Act’s reasonable-accommodation duty) applies to Harrisburg rentals on its own terms and is not narrowed by anything in SDCL chapter 20-13. Where the state-law argument turns on reading two 1986 sections together, the federal duty simply says what it says.

Name both. The state duty because it is the local one and carries punitive damages; the federal one because it does not depend on the argument above.

The money at Harrisburg prices

SDCL 43-32-6.1 caps everything the landlord holds at one month’s rent “however denominated.” At a $1,362 median that ceiling is substantial, and a pet charge stacked on top of it is a larger sum than almost anywhere else in the state.

Where the animal is a genuine accommodation the charge should not be there at all, SDCL 20-13-20(2) makes disability discrimination in “the terms, conditions, or privileges” of a rental an unfair or discriminatory practice.

Damage is still yours. SDCL 43-32-24 lets a lessor keep back the reasonable cost of restoring the unit to the state it was in when the tenancy started, setting ordinary wear and tear aside, and puts them on a twenty-one day clock to return the balance or give written reasons.

If the answer stays no

SDCL 20-13-31 allows 180 days from when the practice occurred, with no discovery language. A landlord’s confident and mistaken citation of 20-13-21.1 does not stop that clock, and a tenant who spends four months looking it up has spent most of the window.

Where the two 1986 sections actually meet

There is a clean way to test which of them your request falls under.

Ask what the landlord would have to do. If the answer involves building, altering, buying or paying for something, SDCL 20-13-21.1 is engaged and the cost allocation in SDCL 20-13-20(4) (at the disabled person’s expense) is the answer.

If the answer is “stop applying a clause in the lease to this tenant,” none of the three items in 20-13-21.1 is engaged, and what remains is the good-faith duty in 20-13-23.7.

That test is quick, it is faithful to the words, and it is much easier to state in a letter than an argument about session laws.

The part the citation contest never reaches

Start with a clinician you already see. Most Harrisburg households get their care in Sioux Falls, which is the deepest bench in the state and still means two to four months for a new patient, with several large practices declining housing documentation as standing policy.

Where that route is closed, a licensed evaluation is the same examination arranged on purpose, someone licensed determining whether a disability exists and whether this animal answers it, then writing the determination or explaining why not. Both endings are real.

Against a landlord who arrives with a statute number, an argument about 1986 session laws is worth having. It is worth much more when the thing it is protecting is a determination somebody actually made.