How the Fair Housing Act Gave Us Emotional Support Parrots
The first two parrots merely annoyed the neighbors. But after the third arrived, the U.S. Department of Justice got involved—on the side of the parrots.
In 2024, a New York woman teamed up with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to squeeze a six-figure settlement out of her former co-op building. The building’s transgression? Violating her right to keep not one, not two, but three emotional support parrots in her home.
It’s a colorful case, but it isn’t atypical.
A stampede of emotional support dogs, cats, llamas, peacocks, ducks, miniature horses, and more are showing up in America’s airports, businesses, and apartment complexes. This has produced no shortage of conflict, particularly in the housing context.
Across the nation, landlords have been feuding with tenants over whether a federal law designed to protect disabled people’s access to housing also guarantees renters’ right to keep fauna of nearly all shapes and sizes in their homes, “no pet” policies be damned. Small pigs, very large dogs, various lizards, and at least one emu have been caught up in these skirmishes.
The New York woman’s name was Meril Lesser. For nearly two decades, she kept two parrots in her home at a ritzy co-op building in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood.
The birds’ noise provoked occasional complaints from other residents of the building, named The Rutherford. When Lesser acquired a third bird in 2015, the conflict escalated.
Within months, her neighbors filed dozens of noise complaints with the city. The building’s management company sent Lesser letters citing the bird’s excessive squawking.
In response, Lesser took measures to soundproof her home, promised to add additional soundproofing, and noted that the city’s inspectors had failed to formally cite her for noise violations. This did little to mollify the neighbors. In 2016, the co-op board moved to evict Lesser.
The case dragged on for years in Manhattan civil court, the standard venue for such private housing disputes. Then, in 2021, The Rutherford was hit with a countersuit over its attempted eviction—not from Lesser, but from the federal government. The Department of Justice (DOJ) got involved because Lesser claimed her parrots were “emotional support animals,” and that she required them to soothe her depression and anxiety. Therefore, she argued, the Fair Housing Act entitled her to keep them.
She won the argument. In August 2024, The Rutherford agreed to a settlement requiring it to pay Lesser $185,000 in damages and to purchase her apartment at the above-market rate of $585,000. It’s the largest recovery the DOJ has ever obtained in an assistance animal case.
Pet Issues
Americans love their pets. Some 90 million households have at least one dog or cat. A few million more keep fish, birds, rodents, or reptiles. Owners collectively spend $150 billion a year on their well-being.
Less enamored with Fifi and Fido are America’s landlords, who often try to guard against the noise, damage, mess, and menace that pets can create by charging pet fees, enforcing breed restrictions, and adopting no-pet policies. Inevitably, this results in conflicts with pet owners.
The landlords might seem to have the upper hand: In every state, their right to exclude pets is a legally protected property right. But since the 1990s, America’s animal lovers have discovered a powerful trump card in the Fair Housing Act’s requirement that landlords provide reasonable exceptions to their policies and practices for the disabled.
The Fair Housing Act was passed in the 1960s with the primary intention of ending racial discrimination in real estate. Subsequent decades have seen the law’s scope expand to cover more categories of discrimination; this happens occasionally through congressional amendments, but more often through court decisions or regulatory guidance.
The result: A landlord who turns away a tenant with an animal or who charges a pet fee could be found guilty of disability discrimination if that animal, like Lesser’s third parrot, is deemed a legitimate emotional support animal.
Fair housing lawyers argue that protections for emotional support animals are a faithful, sensible interpretation of the law’s protections for the disabled. Property owners contend the rules are vague, easy to exploit, and a source of legal liability when they try to exercise their right to restrict pets on their property.
Online businesses have arisen promising the opportunity to register pets as emotional support animals with just a few clicks and the payment of a small fee. Federal regulators and state lawmakers have tried to establish clear definitions of emotional support animals and to crack down on the most scam-ridden emotional support animal paperwork mills.
Call it a game of cat and mouse—either of which could, in theory, count as an emotional support animal in a court of law.
‘Reasonable Accommodation’
The text of the Fair Housing Act never mentions emotional support animals. Their protection under the statute comes from court rulings fleshing out the law’s requirement that disabled people be given “reasonable accommodations.”
That guarantee first appeared in 1988, when the Fair Housing Act’s antidiscrimination protections were expanded to cover people with a mental or physical “handicap,” a term later superseded by “disability.” This change was a pet cause of Rep. Hamilton Fish IV (R–N.Y.); it received wide bipartisan support in Congress and was backed by the National Association of Realtors.
In addition to not discriminating openly against the disabled, housing providers must make whatever “reasonable accommodations” are “necessary to afford a [disabled person] equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling.”
The law also beefed up tenants’ ability to have federal officials investigate discrimination claims and sue alleged violators.
The 1988 amendment’s definition of reasonable accommodation was purposefully vague. It exists to give disabled people
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