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 a general right to ask for individualized exceptions to their landlords' policies to accommodate their individualized needs. In turn, the law is supposed to protect landlords from having to provide accommodations that would be unreasonably expensive, unsafe, or impractical.

In 1989, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—which along with the DOJ is tasked with enforcing the Fair Housing Act—issued regulations that spelled out some archetypal examples of reasonable accommodation. They included making an exception to a no-pet policy for a blind tenant's seeing eye dog.

Protections for emotional support animals arrived soon after.

In 1993, Beatrice Exelberth of New York filed a complaint with HUD alleging that her co-op building illegally discriminated by fining, and later evicting, her for keeping a terrier in violation of the building's no-pet policy.

Exelberth had a long, documented history of depression. In her HUD complaint, she argued that keeping her terrier in the house helped ease her mental distress and that therefore she should be entitled to keep the dog as a reasonable accommodation.

Exelberth's building was clearly willing to accommodate its disabled residents. It permitted a seeing eye dog, and it widened doorways and entrances to make them wheelchair accessible. But the building drew the line at an emotional support animal, reasoning that all animals provide some sort of emotional support and that allowing one as a reasonable accommodation would effectively nullify its no-pet policy.

A HUD administrative law judge disagreed.

Even though Exelberth's building "asserts that the soothing benefit of dogs can be enjoyed by all, it fails to acknowledge the terrier's special benefit" to her, the judge wrote in 1994. "The dog gives Ms. Exelberth the same freedom that a wheelchair provides a physically disabled person."

Exelberth's case helped establish the principle that accommodations for animals that provide some emotional benefit to a tenant with a mental disability were to be treated much the same as accommodations and building alterations that would allow a disabled tenant to physically access housing.

Subsequent court decisions over the next two decades have expanded what counts as a required accommodation. Accommodations for emotional support animals have been held to preempt landlords' restrictions on certain types of animals, weight limits, breed limits, the number of animals a tenant can keep, and more.

Critics argue these rulings have gone well beyond the initial intent and meaning of the Fair Housing Act.

Jim Burling, vice president of legal affairs at the Pacific Legal Foundation, stresses that he loves his dogs. But the law, he says, "has gotten hijacked by the emotional support animal stuff. I think it's a general trend in government that you have a set of regulators who want to achieve some progressive good and you can do that by stretching the law."

Defenders of the rulings argue this case law falls within the original intent of the Fair Housing Act. "The concept of an emotional support animal is not fundamentally different in housing than in the case of a seeing eye dog," says Michael Allen, a partner at the fair housing firm Relman Colfax who has litigated emotional support animal cases. He wrote one of the earliest briefs on fair housing and emotional support animals, and he says that landlords misunderstand "what accommodation was all about. It's a very individualized process. The fact that a person with a disability can get a service animal doesn't mean you and I could get Rover the pet who performs no services."

As court decisions expanding the reasonable accommodations for emotional support animals have grown, so too have conflicts over these animals.

According to a 2020 HUD regulatory guidance document, "complaints concerning denial of reasonable accommodations and disability access comprise almost 60% of all FHA complaints and those involving requests for reasonable accommodations for assistance animals are significantly increasing."

In recent years, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, responsible for prosecuting federal crimes in the country's largest city and its largest financial center, has found the time to charge 10 separate property owners with failing to accommodate an emotional support animal.

Faced with these legal consequences, many landlords are allowing animals even when they'd be within their rights to turn them away.

A Chilling Effect

About a month after Eric Dillenberger rented out a newly constructed apartment he owns in Manhattan, his new tenant asked him to come over to address some minor issue with the unit. When Dillenberger arrived, he was greeted by the tenant's dog, a giant Caucasian shepherd.

Caucasian shepherds have been used to hunt bears and guard prisons. They can weigh nearly 200 pounds. The American Kennel Club describes them as a "serious guardian breed" that "should never be taken lightly." The Caucasian shepherd dog in Dillenberger's apartment ended up there after washing out of an Israel Defense Forces K-9 unit.

"When I say they look like a small lion, I'm not exaggerating," Dillenberger says. "The dog is looking at me like I'm a milk biscuit and he's following me around everywhere and growling at me."

While Dillenberger allowed pets on his property, his insurance also placed limits on certain large breeds. Caucasian shepherd dogs are rare in the U.S. and were not one of the explicitly named exceptions.

Any conversation about whether such a large, menacing dog was appropriate for the building was quickly short-circuited by Dillenberger's tenant's claim that the canine was his emotional support animal.

It's impossible to tell whether an animal is a pet or a federally protected emotional support animal just by looking at it. Unlike service animals, whose breed types and training requirements are spelled out in federal law, the particular features of emotional support animals are rather fuzzy.

The same animal would be rightly considered a pet if owned by one person and an emotional support animal if owned by another. The distinction lies in just how much an animal's owner reportedly needs the emotional support it provides.

In 2020, HUD released a 19-page regulatory guidance document that lays out some general principles for establishing when an animal warrants a reasonable accommodation.

Cats, dogs, birds, Guinea pigs, and other animals commonly kept in households can generally be assumed to qualify as emotional support animals. Kangaroos and monkeys can generally be assumed to not qualify.

Tenants requesting accommodations must also have a document from a health care provider saying they need their emotional support animals. That health care provider is supposed to have personal knowledge of the patient and the patient's need for an animal.

This HUD guidance is supposed to put some outer bounds on emotional support animal protections. Landlords complain it's done little to clarify things.

"It's continued to muddy the waters," says Charles Tassell, chief operating officer of the National Real Estate Investors Association. "It's left exceptions in there that say 'a lizard or turtle probably not' unless your health care provider says otherwise."

Health care providers asked to provide these letters are also often ignorant of what counts as a legally legitimate emotional support animal. It is, after all, a regulatory category, not a clinical one.

Providers and mental health care professionals fielding requests for emotional support animal letters will often just issue them without too many questions asked.

"Many therapists, who are very well-intentioned, they'll say, 'Oh yeah, you're really stressed about not being able to take your pet to college' or 'The only apartment you can afford doesn't allow pets, let me write this letter for you,'" says Sarah Clark, a therapist who works primarily with physically disabled patients and trains other therapists to do the same.

She estimates that "99.9 percent" of requests for emotional support animal documents that therapists receive would fall short of the regulatory requirements.

The psychiatric research on emotional support animals is mixed on whether they provide appreciable, clinical benefits. The same research and professional guidance to psychiatrists cautions mental health care providers from writing these letters in the first place.

This guidance has sway only over therapists who are interested in studiously following the law. It has done little to curb the cottage industry of online services that connect pet owners with health care professionals willing to dash off an emotional support animal letter to anyone willing to pay a fee.

Feeling Anxious About Pet Fees?

"Bypass rental fees or breed restrictions. It's fast, simple, and you can save thousands," blares an online video ad from the service Pettable.

The company offers emotional support animal letters to anyone who completes a short quiz, does a 15-minute online consultation with a therapist, and pays a $169 fee. Its website says Pettable has helped register 250,000 emotional support animals.

That's one of maybe a dozen online companies that explicitly offer their services to people looking to avoid pet deposits and no-pet policies. Some make a greater show of hewing to HUD requirements around emotional support animals than others. None can be said to be operating in the spirit of the regulations.

"If you have an IQ over the level of a bowl of Jell-O and you're capable of a certain amount of deception," Burling says, it's not hard to obtain a letter from one of these services.

This reporter managed to clear that low bar. Within a few minutes of completing the Pettable quiz asking whether I'd felt anxiety in the past week, I got an email from a social worker telling me I was a "great candidate" for an emotional support animal letter and that I "won't have to worry about extra pet fees, deposits, or restrictions."

Once one has an emotional support letter in hand, particularly if it's endorsed by a licensed health care provider, few landlords are willing to challenge it.

"We get them every day. We get them from the same social worker in Hawaii. It's the same letter every time. You know she's just pumping these out to make some money. But it's very hard to push back," says Jeffrey Turk, a Massachusetts-based lawyer who's represented landlords for 30 years. For most landlords, "it's not worth the risk."

Lawyers who represent tenants seeking reasonable accommodations for emotional support animals also tend to find these services reprehensible.

"It does make my job more difficult. I think it makes landlords more skeptical, because people have taken advantage of the law," says Marcy LaHart, a Florida-based lawyer who has sued on behalf of a number of clients requesting accommodation for their emotional support animals.

She says she used one of these online services to get a service dog ID for her pet Cuban tree frog named Hop Sing. For a small fee, she got a plastic badge with a picture of her frog declaring it a service dog.

Recent joint HUD-DOJ guidance on assistance animals cautions against these online services, saying that "documentation from the internet is not, by itself, sufficient to reliably establish that an individual has a non-observable disability or disability-related need for an assistance animal."

Turk says this guidance has helped guard against the most scam-ridden and exploitative websites. But those businesses that go through the motions of connecting a customer with a signed letter from a licensed health care provider are still going strong.

When The New York Times reported on these services in 2019, it noted that the National Service Animal Registry—the same operation that registered LaHart's tree frog as a service dog—listed 2,400 animals in 2011. By 2019, that number had grown to "nearly 200,000." Today, it has 250,866.

Emotional Support Property Rights?

As complaints about these letter mills have grown, some legislatures have tried to push back.

In 2020, Florida lawmakers incorporated the HUD regulatory guidance requiring health care providers to have "personal knowledge" of someone's disability before issuing an emotional support animal letter into state law. Kentucky has created criminal penalties for letter signers who fail that standard.

The hope among proponents of these laws is that they'll clarify the requirements for legitimate emotional support animals for people who need them while cracking down on the people and services cynically trying to get around pet fees.

Meanwhile, fair housing law is evolving to protect people with emotional support animals not just from landlords but from local zoning officials as well.

LaHart says she's represented several clients who've had county code enforcement called on their emotional support minipigs.

In 2023, retired bitcoin miner Nicholas Olenik was cited by Virginia Beach code enforcement for keeping Nimbus, his emotional support emu. He was accused of violating the city's restrictions on raising livestock in residential neighborhoods.

A Virginia circuit court judge eventually ruled in Olenik's favor. The decision ended up turning on the distinction in Virginia law between livestock and companion animals, not federal fair housing law. But Olenik's therapist-signed letter declaring Nimbus an emotional support emu helped him establish that the bird was a permissible pet under the city's zoning code.

"I read the law, and I already had everything nationally backing me. Whatever happened to being in the freest country in the world?" Olenik says.

The right to an emotional support animal, be it dog, emu, or parrot, is a case study in regulatory creep, bureaucratic overreach, and expansive interpretation of the law. Over time, the reasonable-sounding premise that landlords should not discriminate based on race, gender, or disability produced a legal absurdity and a costly ambiguity.

The costs and potential penalties landlords face if they object to an alleged emotional support animal have left many property owners nervous about asserting their rights. Cynical letter mills have made this chilling effect even worse. More precise line drawing from courts, federal regulators, and state governments can do only so much to erect guardrails around the abuse of emotional support animal protections.

In a country that purports to love both pets and property rights, conflicts like these will probably persist for years. Whether or not parrots are involved, the legal contortions that made those disputes possible are for the birds.