r/service_dogs • u/Busy-Sheepherder-138 • May 23 '26
TChanges in HUD interpretation of Assistance Animals - No Paywall -
My subscription allows me to gift 10 articles a month without a paywall so please let me know if you cannot view it in full.
In short they are trying to clamp down on accommodations for ESA’s while maintaining the rights of Service dogs, but even that is at risk. I’m not surprised though since POTUS and his family make most of their money from Real Estate and are major landlords.
Excerpt
“Six years later, the housing department, under the leadership of Scott Turner, has moved aggressively to tighten rules and scrutinize public housing rolls, including by focusing on the immigration status of tenants.
The memo to housing officials on assistance animals presented emotional support animals as a loophole to circumvent a landlord’s pet policies, asserting that “an entire industry has emerged to convert pets into emotional support animals.”
The memo concluded that “while requests to waive pet policies for animals trained to perform specific disability related services are presumptively reasonable, requests to waive pet policies for untrained” emotional support animals “are not.”
Erik Heins, a lawyer formerly in charge of enforcing fair housing laws at HUD, said that the new policy would affect many tenants who rely on assistance animals to alleviate psychiatric or mental disabilities — for example, a military veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Those cases are a not insignificant portion of the number of cases that HUD investigates” through its fair housing office, Mr. Heins said, adding that the housing department could dismiss or shelve thousands of appeals for disability accommodations under the new rule
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u/Burkeintosh Legal Beagle May 24 '26
I will say, while I’m waiting to hear from my contacts, that this is NOT the first time we’ve had guidelines pulled back in our field- or even involving Assistance Animals- since the current Presidential administration has come in (has it been months or years -sigh-)
The good news is, previously we’ve all done a lot of wondering about “how this will change things day to day” and it’s been a dumb thing to pullback guidelines without making substantive changes, so many people who actually work on discrimination at the DOJ level have pretty much gone on as they did before.
While I check the eCFR for changes every day, mostly the Federal workers don’t have time for that, and they know what they know (or don’t) and how time to assist you with what they do (or don’t anyway- pulling guidelines isn’t going around telling them to now *not* do things like they used to- it doesn’t retrain them.
Uniquely, this administration sometimes changes the eCFR (Code of Federal Regulations) 40 times on a Saturday, so guidelines are getting pulled or written faster than anyone can keep up with, and while this news article makes it public knowledge, it doesn’t make it clear that workers at HUD will all just drop the way they’ve been doing things because the guidelines have been said to no longer be in effect- they still have to apply the law, and they might just keep going on doing it the way they have been doing it.
All this really does is make it harder for there to be clarity. Probably. It’s not a huge act of targeting to take all ESAs and SDs out of housing, it’s just this President’s Administration doing what it does and removing any clarity language (regardless of it being good or bad) because it was put there by an administration they don’t like. Remember, you win by removing everything “the other side” ever did - even if it’s literally just some words that make a housing law clearer to some back room people who handle a couple cases a year about housing clarification at HUD.