Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Mitchell, SD

More renters, proportionally, than Sioux Falls

Mitchell has 3,172 renting households out of 7,305 occupied homes, 43.4 percent on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate. That is twelve points above the 31.4 percent statewide figure, fifth of South Dakota’s twenty largest cities by share, and higher than either Sioux Falls (40.5%) or Rapid City (37.1%).

Median gross rent is $851, about ten percent under the $946 state median. The 2024 Census estimate puts the city at 15,621, seventh in the state and forty-nine people behind Yankton.

A town of fifteen thousand where more than two in five households rent has a real rental market, small buildings, and leases written from templates. Those templates carry pet charges, and a tenant with an assistance animal goes looking for the South Dakota statute that strikes them out.

There isn’t one.

Say that part plainly

South Dakota has no statute barring a pet fee or pet deposit for an assistance animal. Not in chapter 43-32, which regulates deposits. Not in chapter 20-13, which prohibits discrimination. Both chapters were read section by section for this material, and the sentence does not exist.

That is worth stating flatly because the alternative (implying a fee bar and letting a reader discover otherwise in a leasing office) is how a page gets someone’s request refused.

Compare the neighbours. Oregon writes “service animal or companion animal” directly into ORS 90.300(4)’s deposit bar. Maine says an assistance animal may not be conditioned on a fee. Kansas has an express extra-charge bar in K.S.A. 39-1108, though it belongs to trained dogs. South Dakota gives you the outcome and withholds the sentence.

What you argue instead

SDCL 20-13-20 opens by making it an unfair or discriminatory practice for an owner of rights to housing, or a person acting for one:

“(2) To discriminate against any person because of that person’s race, color, creed, religion, sex, ancestry, disability, familial status, or national origin, in the terms, conditions, or privileges of the sale, rental, lease, assignment, sublease, or other transfer of any real property or housing accommodation or any part, portion, or interest therein”

The structure of the argument is short.

1. An assistance animal, where the accommodation is required, is in the home because of the disability. It is not a lifestyle choice the tenant made.
2. A pet deposit or monthly pet charge attached to that animal is therefore a term or condition of the rental applied because of the disability. 3. SDCL 20-13-20(2) makes exactly that unlawful.

Behind it sits 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B), the federal Fair Housing Act’s reasonable-accommodation duty, which applies to Mitchell rentals on its own terms and whose enforcement history around fees is far longer than anything in South Dakota law.

Notice what kind of thing this is. It is an argument, in three steps, from a general prohibition. It is not a citation you can put on the counter and point at. That difference determines everything about how a Mitchell request should be made.

What the subdivision reaches, and what it does not

“Terms, conditions, or privileges” is about the content of the tenancy: the monthly charge, the one-time fee, which units you are offered, what the renewal looks like.

An outright refusal to rent is a different subdivision, SDCL 20-13-20(1), refusing “to sell, rent, lease, assign, sublease, or otherwise transfer” because of disability. Between them the two subdivisions cover both a closed door and a worse deal behind an open one, and it is worth knowing which one your situation is.

The cap, which is not the same thing

SDCL 43-32-6.1 bars a residential security deposit “however denominated” above one month’s rent. At Mitchell’s $851 median that is a low ceiling in dollars, and the phrase “however denominated” stops a pet charge being added on top of a full deposit under another name.

But a cap on lawful charges is not a bar on unlawful ones. 43-32-6.1 tells you how much a landlord may hold; 20-13-20(2) tells you whether they should be holding it at all. Keep the two apart, because conflating them is how a request gets answered with a correct “that section caps deposits, it does not ban them.”

The landlord’s side of it

They may ask for documentation. SDCL 43-32-34 says so expressly, unless the disability or the disability-related need is “readily apparent or already known” to them: an exception that comes up more often in a city of fifteen thousand than in a large management portfolio, but is not automatic.

They keep damage. SDCL 43-32-24 permits withholding what is reasonably necessary to restore the premises to their condition at the start of the tenancy, ordinary wear and tear excepted.

If a Mitchell landlord keeps charging

The practice is the charge, and SDCL 20-13-31 gives 180 days from when it occurred, with no discovery language, to file with the Division of Human Rights in the Department of Labor and Regulation. Where the charge recurs monthly, record each one by date rather than assuming the clock restarts on its own.

There is more at stake than the money. SDCL 20-13-35.1 makes punitive damages available under SDCL 21-3-2 for a violation of SDCL 20-13-20 to 20-13-21.2, and permits attorneys’ fees and costs to the prevailing party “for housing matters.” That is a different posture from a small-claims argument about $40 a month.

Making an argument rather than a citation

Because the Mitchell position is a three-step argument, it reads better when it is written as one.

State the accommodation you need and why the animal is connected to a disability. State that the charge is attached to that animal. Then say that a charge applied because of a disability is a term of the rental within SDCL 20-13-20(2), and that the federal Fair Housing Act says the same.

That is three sentences and it survives being repeated back. What does not survive is the shorter version, “South Dakota does not allow pet fees for support animals”, because the first thing a landlord’s adviser will do is look for the statute that says so, and there is not one.

And do not overstate it. The argument wins in the ordinary case; it is not a certainty, and a landlord who says “show me the statute” is asking a fair question with no direct answer. The honest reply is that South Dakota reaches the result through its general discrimination provision rather than a specific fee bar, which is a better answer than an invented citation.

Which is why the assessment carries the weight

Start with a clinician you already see. In Mitchell that is a shorter list than the population suggests: the city serves a wide agricultural catchment from a small number of practices, new-patient waits run to months, and some prescribers decline housing documentation as a matter of policy.

Where that route is closed, a licensed evaluation is the same examination performed on purpose: a licensed clinician determines whether a disability exists and whether this animal answers it, then writes the determination or explains that they will not. Both endings are real.

South Dakota gave you no sentence to point at. What it left you with is a first step that has to be true.