Accommodations

RSS

In this lesson, we’re going to review fair housing rules on dealing with individuals with mobility impairments. Federal fair housing law bans discrimination against people on the basis of disability, including a wide range of mobility impairments. People with mobility impairments who use wheelchairs are particularly likely to face housing discrimination, according to a 2015 nationwide study conducted by HUD and the Urban Institute. Among its key findings:

In this Special Issue of Fair Housing Coach, we’re presenting highlights from the Coach’s June 2018 webinar on handling reasonable accommodation requests.

In this lesson, we’re following up on the Coach’s April 2018 lesson on facing your fair housing fears and everyday dilemmas. For that lesson—and a related webinar presentation—we turned to veteran fair housing expert, Anne Sadovsky, who has logged millions of miles traveling across the country educating property owners and management professionals.

This month, we’re going to review fair housing rules banning disability discrimination. Understanding these rules—and applying them properly—is key to protecting your community from fair housing trouble.

This month, the Coach tackles a fair housing myth: You have to treat everyone the same to comply with fair housing law. It’s a common belief, but it’s not as simple as that. The law requires that you give everyone an equal opportunity to live at your community—not that you treat everyone the same.

This month, the Coach reviews an increasingly common source of fair housing trouble: requests for assistance animals. There’s a lot of confusion over assistance animals, which can go by many names—service animals, therapy animals, companion animals, emotional support animals—and there are different sets of rules on when, where, and what types of animals may be used by individuals with disabilities in various settings.

This month, the Coach reviews how fair housing laws may affect how you handle environmental concerns in the upkeep of your community.

In this lesson, the focus is on disability discrimination, the leading cause of fair housing complaints filed each year. The reasons vary, but many stem from disputes over requests for reasonable accommodations—that is, exceptions to the community’s usual rules or policies—for applicants or residents with disabilities. Last year, for example, more than 3,300 of the 8,300 complaints—40 percent—of complaints received by HUD and its state and ...

In this lesson, the Coach reviews how fair housing rules may affect your ability to regulate smoking at your community. There has been a trend toward smoke-free housing policies, which recently got a big boost when HUD ordered all public housing agencies to go smoke-free by 2018. The new rule, which applies only to public housing, will affect 700,000 units nationwide.

In this lesson, the Coach highlights court cases, all decided in the past few months, involving reasonable accommodation requests.

Fair housing law bans discrimination based on disability, which, among other things, requires communities to make reasonable accommodations to rules, policies, or services when necessary to allow an individual with a disability to use and enjoy his or her home. More than half of the thousands of the fair housing complaints fil...