Accommodations

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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...

In this month’s lesson, the focus is on parking. Fair housing law bans discrimination based on disability, including refusing to grant requests by individuals with disabilities who need an exception to your parking policies as a reasonable accommodation so they may use and enjoy their homes.

In this Special Issue, the Coach follows up on our recent series on assistance animals by answering reader questions with updates on recent developments in the law.

This month’s lesson is the second of a two-part series on handling disability-related requests for assistance animals. In Part 1, we focused on who qualifies as an individual with a disability and when you must make a reasonable accommodation to your pet policies to allow an assistance animal at the community.

This month’s lesson is the first of a two-part series on assistance animals—a common source of fair housing trouble. Disability discrimination claims account for more than half of all fair housing complaints, often based on disputes over requests by applicants or residents with disabilities to have the assistance animals.

In this month’s lesson, Fair Housing Coach invites you to be the judge in several recent court cases involving reasonable accommodation requests. Fair housing law prohibits housing discrimination based on disability, and one form of disability discrimination is refusal to make reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities.

This month, the Coach focuses on fair housing rules based on disability, the most common source of discrimination complaints and lawsuits faced by multifamily housing communities today. At last count, more than half the formal complaints filed with public agencies and private fair housing organizations were based on disability.

In this month’s lesson, Fair Housing Coach reviews the ongoing debate over medical marijuana—and how it may affect your community. Now that it’s lawful in many states, you may be wondering about whether you must allow use of medical marijuana at your community.

     You’re not alone—it’s a confusing area with conflicting laws, evolving regulatory systems, and little definitive guidance on how to hand...

This month’s lesson addresses fair housing accessibility requirements. Compliance can get complicated because of the number and complexity of federal, state, and local laws and codes that address accessibility in various settings.

     To keep it simple, we’ll focus on the primary law that governs accessibility in multifamily housing communities—the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA). The FHA, which bans housing discrimination bas...