Metro Apartment Manager (PDF), April 2006

Q: We’re considering prohibiting smoking in our small plex because we think it will improve the quality of tenants we get. Is that legal?

A: Fair housing laws protect people who belong to protected classes. That means you can’t say you rent to them because they are members of a protected class. Of course, all of us belong to protected classes: we all are one sex or another (or… but that’s for another column), one race or another (or more than one), one religion or another (or none).

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Metro Apartment Manager, February 2006

Q: Generally, I don’t allow pets. I did rent to someone with a seeing eye dog one time. Now I have a tenant who simply wants a cat as a “companion animal.” Do I have to do that? I’m inclined to just give her a 30-day notice and ask her to leave.

A: Coming between people — and not just tenants — and their pets is often more perilous than coming between a mother and her first born. If you allow pets, you greatly expand your universe of potential tenants. I believe, too, that good pet owners make great tenants, because it’s harder for them to move and people who take care of their pets generally take care of their home as well. I suspect, though, that roughly half of rental housing doesn’t allow pets. Some tenant advocates would like to prohibit landlords from not allowing pets. The Province of Ontario does exactly that. The City of Toronto even makes pet owners a protected class.

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Metro Apartment Manager, April 2005

Q: We have lots of children in our complex — lots of parents, too. Because the latter too often don’t supervise the former, we put in our rules several years ago one saying, “Parents must supervise their children.” I think this is legal because parents are responsible for their children. But now I’m getting one tenant—a law student, of course — who says that’s illegal. Is it?

A: Issues around people with disabilities might be the most frequent, but the ones around families with children are in my mind more complex. Before 1988, when Congress passed the Fair Housing Amendments Act, life was simple. Discrimination consisted of protections based on race, color, national origin, sex, and religion. It wasn’t too difficult to develop a working understanding of what that meant without going back to school. But when handicap/disability and familial status got added, life — for landlords, anyway — suddenly became infinitely more complex.

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