Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Sammamish, WA

The least-rented city on the list

Sammamish rents at 17.4%: roughly 3,900 of 22,144 occupied units on the 2020-2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate. That is less than half the statewide 36.2%, and the lowest share of any of Washington’s twenty largest cities by a considerable margin.

The contrast with its immediate neighbour is striking. Redmond, a few miles west, rents at 56.8% and is the most-rented large city in the state. Two cities on the same plateau sit at opposite ends of the range.

Almost everything let in Sammamish is a detached house inside a planned community with recorded covenants. So the animal question arrives here in a particular form: not a leasing policy, but a rule adopted by neighbours and enforced by a board.

A covenant is a rule, not an exception

The first assumption to dispose of is that a recorded covenant occupies different ground from a lease clause because it was registered against the title.

For the purposes of Washington’s disability discrimination chapter it does not. WAC 162-38-100(3) provides that a landlord may not refuse to rent to a person with a disability because that person uses an assistance animal, and that a no-pet policy cannot be applied to such an animal. The regulation addresses the policy’s effect, not the document it happens to live in.

What brings a board inside that rule is the definition. WAC 162-38-040 treats as a landlord anyone other than the occupant who controls the use of property under a claim of right arising from an ownership interest: including persons controlling common areas, and anyone acting in an owner’s interest.

An owner who says the community will not permit it has therefore not identified something outside the regulation. They have identified a second party inside it.

The charge that arrives from the board

Associations apply their own animal charges, and an owner letting a house usually passes them through as a term of the tenancy.

WAC 162-38-100(5) does not allow an animal-specific deposit alongside the cleaning or damage deposit a disabled tenant already pays. Where the money originates with a board and reaches the tenant through the owner, it is the same demand arriving from a different direction.

Subsection (4) leaves the ordinary deposit standing, provided the owner charges it to every tenant rather than only where an animal is present.

The meeting nobody should have to attend

The distinctive Sammamish difficulty is procedural rather than substantive. Boards decide collectively, in meetings, and a request for an accommodation gets scheduled as an agenda item, which means a tenant is invited to explain a health condition to their neighbours.

Where the disability and the need for the animal are not readily apparent, a request for supporting information is legitimate. What is not legitimate is what follows it. WAC 162-38-110 draws the line at private matters the tenancy does not genuinely require, and the regulation’s own illustration is deliberately mundane: asking how many people will occupy a home is reasonable, while the details of how somebody is assisted, and when, ordinarily are not the enquirer’s business.

A written request, answered in writing by whoever administers the community, is both sufficient and appropriate. A hearing is neither.

The indemnity attached to the approval

Where boards do approve, the approval frequently arrives with a form requiring the resident to accept liability or hold the association harmless.

WAC 162-38-120 makes exactly that an unfair practice. Rights may not be bargained away, and indemnities may not be extracted, in exchange for getting or keeping the tenancy, where the reason for asking is that a disabled resident or one with an assistance animal will be living there.

The distinction is narrow but real. Being answerable for damage the animal actually causes is an ordinary obligation and survives. Signing away rights because the animal exists does not become enforceable by being printed on a form.

When the request is for a child

Family housing produces requests made by one household member for another, and boards frequently respond that the applicant does not appear to be disabled.

WAC 162-38-060 disposes of that. An unfair practice on the basis of disability includes discrimination because of a disability of the renter, of a person residing in or intending to reside in the dwelling, or of any person associated with that renter. A parent requesting an accommodation for a child who lives in the home is within the regulation.

Training, registries, and neither being relevant

Boards researching the question tend to arrive at the state’s service animal definition, which requires individual training and excludes comfort and companionship from the meaning of work or tasks.

RCW 49.60.040(25) closes by removing that subsection from RCW 49.60.222 through 49.60.227 with respect to housing accommodations and real estate transactions. The whole of the state’s fair housing law. It governs shops and workplaces. It does not govern a home.

Nor is there any credential to produce. Washington operates no register of assistance animals and no agency issues certificates or identification for them, so a document bought online addresses none of the questions the regulation asks.

Removal, and the common areas

WAC 162-38-105 permits a demand that the animal go only where two things hold together: unreasonable danger to people or property arising from the animal’s conduct, and an earlier sensible attempt at correcting that conduct which did not work.

Two of its supporting rules matter especially in a covenanted community. Annoyance on the part of other residents is expressly not a qualifying risk. And an animal may not be removed from an entire property because it presents a risk in part of it, which is directly relevant where a complaint concerns a shared trail, a park or a clubhouse rather than the house itself.

The deposit rules apply here too

Covenanted communities generate so much argument about rules that the ordinary tenancy protections get overlooked, and they are worth stating.

An owner letting a Sammamish house cannot take a deposit at all without a written agreement and a signed, dated record of the property’s condition and cleanliness at handover (RCW 59.18.260). Where that was not done, the deposit is owed straight back.

At the far end, RCW 59.18.280 allows thirty days from the tenancy finishing and the house being emptied for a written, itemised account of anything withheld, supported by the estimates or invoices behind each damage charge. Ordinary wear is not chargeable. Let the thirty days lapse and the right to retain any of it is gone.

None of that is affected by what the community’s covenants say.

Complaining about a board

A complaint about a board goes to the same place as a complaint about a landlord. The Washington State Human Rights Commission takes housing discrimination complaints statewide, and RCW 49.60.230(2)(a) allows a year from the date the practice occurred or terminated, against six months for other discrimination complaints. Filing is through the commission’s online portal, with a toll-free line on 1-800-233-3247.

King County additionally runs a Civil Rights Program covering housing among the areas it enforces, at civilrights@kingcounty.gov or 206-263-2446.

Ask for the decision, and the rule relied on, in writing from both the owner and the community. In a city where the rules were adopted by neighbours, the document naming who refused and why is what turns a dispute into a claim.

For the statutes behind these rules, see the Washington ESA law guide, and our guide to getting an ESA letter for what belongs in the supporting documentation.