Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Tea, SD

Four hundred and forty rentals, at the state’s third-highest rent

Tea has 440 renting households out of 2,171 occupied homes, 20.3 percent on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate, eighteenth of South Dakota’s twenty largest cities and eleven points below the 31.4 percent statewide figure.

Median gross rent is $1,220, third highest in the state behind Box Elder ($1,491) and Harrisburg ($1,362), and twenty-nine percent above the $946 state median. The 2024 Census estimate puts the city at 7,699.

The combination is characteristic of the Sioux Falls commuter ring: mostly new, mostly owner-occupied, expensive when it does rent, and small enough that a tenant with a problem has nowhere else in town to go.

An inventory of South Dakota’s limits

Work through the South Dakota provisions a tenant with an assistance animal might reach for, and each one has a boundary written into its own text.

SDCL 20-13-23.4 (no landlord may prohibit the keeping of a service animal) covers a person “totally or partially physically disabled, totally or partially blind, or totally or partially deaf.” Three categories, and psychiatric and mental disability are in none of them. (The legislature added exactly those words to the public-accommodations section in 2020 and left this one alone.)

SDCL 43-32-33: the definition that expressly includes an emotional support animal, opens “for the purposes of §§ 43-32-34 to 43-32-36, inclusive.” Three documentation sections, and no further.

SDCL 20-13-21.1, nothing in the chapter requires a landlord to modify the property, incur additional expenses, or exercise a higher degree of care.

SDCL 20-13-23.7: the state accommodation duty: is real and carries punitive damages under SDCL 20-13-35.1, but it is a single sentence with an undue-hardship exception, and a landlord will read it next to 20-13-21.1.

None of that makes South Dakota law useless. It does mean that a Tea tenant who opens with a South Dakota citation is opening on the ground where the argument is hardest.

The provision with no carve-out

42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B), the federal Fair Housing Act:

discrimination includes “a refusal to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services, when such accommodations may be necessary to afford such person equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling”

No animal in the sentence. No training requirement. No enumerated categories of disability. No list of three things it does not require. And nothing in the South Dakota code narrows it: a state may add to federal fair-housing protection, not subtract from it.

A no-pets clause is a rule. The accommodation is an exception to that rule. That is the whole structure, and it is the same structure the South Dakota duty uses, without the qualifications attached.

How to actually use this

Lead federal, cite state alongside.

A request that says “I am asking for a reasonable accommodation under the federal Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B), and under SDCL 20-13-23.7” is stronger than one built on a South Dakota section a landlord’s adviser can narrow. It also avoids the trap of citing 20-13-23.4, which is the single most common South Dakota mistake, and it hands the other side a correct answer.

The exemption question changes shape too

SDCL 20-13-20’s owner-occupied exemption covers dwellings for “no more than two families” where the owner occupies one. The federal Act’s exemptions are drawn differently and do not line up with it.

So the two enquiries are genuinely separate. A small Tea landlord outside the South Dakota section may still be inside the federal Act, and the reverse is possible as well. Where a landlord claims an exemption, ask which one, and then ask about the other.

The documentation rules apply either way

This is where a tenant sometimes over-corrects. Basing the claim on federal law does not switch off South Dakota’s paperwork sections; SDCL 43-32-34 applies where a tenant asserts a disability requiring an animal “under any provision of law,” which plainly includes a federal one.

So a Tea landlord may still require reliable supporting documentation (unless the disability or the disability-related need is readily apparent or already known to them), and SDCL 43-32-35 still sets what it must be: confirming the disability, confirming the relationship between the disability and the need for the animal, and originating from a licensed health care provider “who does not operate in this state solely to provide certification for service or assistance animals.”

The source of the right and the standard for the paperwork are two different questions with two different answers.

Money, at Tea prices

SDCL 43-32-6.1 caps everything the landlord holds at one month’s rent “however denominated.” At a $1,220 median that is over twelve hundred dollars, and the phrase is what prevents a pet charge from sitting outside the ceiling under a different heading.

Where the animal is a required accommodation the charge should not appear, SDCL 20-13-20(2) reaches disability discrimination in “the terms, conditions, or privileges” of a rental, and the federal Act’s enforcement history around accommodation-related fees is far longer than anything in South Dakota law.

Two clocks

SDCL 20-13-31 gives 180 days from when the practice occurred for a charge with the Division of Human Rights, with no discovery language.

Federal Fair Housing Act deadlines are set by federal law and run on their own schedule. Do not treat the South Dakota window as the only one in play, and do not let a state deadline pass on the assumption that the federal route is unlimited.

Writing the request so it works under both

A single paragraph can carry both routes, and it is worth writing it that way.

Say that you are a person with a disability, that the animal is connected to it, and that you are requesting a reasonable accommodation to the no-pets clause under 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B) and SDCL 20-13-23.7.

That formulation does three things at once: it names the federal duty first, it keeps the state provision alongside rather than instead, and it avoids the two South Dakota sections a landlord’s adviser could otherwise narrow. It also reads like something a person wrote rather than something copied off a template, which in a 440-unit market matters more than it should.

And keep the state provision in the letter anyway. SDCL 20-13-23.7 carries punitive damages under SDCL 20-13-35.1, which the federal section does not do in the same words. Leading federal is a drafting choice, not a reason to drop the state duty.

What has to be true before any of it

Start with one you already see. They meet the South Dakota source requirement without discussion. For most Tea households that care is in Sioux Falls, the deepest clinical bench in the state, where a new patient still waits two to four months and several large practices decline to write housing documentation as a matter of policy.

Where that is closed, a licensed evaluation is the same examination arranged on purpose: someone licensed decides whether a disability exists and whether this animal answers it, then writes the determination or explains that they cannot. Both endings are real.

In a town with 440 rentals and nowhere else to move, the federal section is what you argue from, and the determination is what makes the argument worth making.