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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