Expectations of Landlords who Rent to Special Needs Tenants

Public and Federal housing property managers from across Alaska gathered last week to review their responsibilities under Federal fair housing laws. Much of the advice about equal access and accommodation of handicapped tenants applies to all landlords.

The new regulations require a landlord to make reasonable accommodation so a tenant can enjoy equal use of an apartment. The tenant must pay for the modifications and the landlord has the right to verify that the tenant has the money if the landlord's personnel are going to the do the work.

The landlord also has the right to require the tenant to restore the apartment to its original condition. But the rules do not permit the landlord to require that things be changed back that won't materially affect the future use of the apartment.

A restoration agreement can require the tenant to establish an escrow account over a reasonable period so the funds are in place when the tenant moves.

Accommodating a handicapped tenant doesn't mean that a landlord has to move bearing walls or change the layout of the entire apartment. It does mean widening door­ways, lowering light switches and thermostats, and installing grab bars in baths, including reinforced blocking behind the sheet rock between the studs.

Restoration means requiring the tenant to remove the grab bars and repairing the wall, but not taking out the reinforcements and returning switches and thermostats to their original heights.

Accommodation of the handicapped also means dealing with access to the rental office, if there is one on site. Locating the resident manager on an upper floor of a building with no elevator, for instance, creates an access question.

The hearing and speech impaired have special needs that landlords can accommo­date with a TDD machine, a teletype device that enables communication by teletype. For the blind it would be a reasonable accommodation to permit the applicant to take the rental application and lease to a reader, even if the rule is that people have to fill out the application on-site and go over the lease with the manager in person.

Private landlords who do not have Section 8 federally assisted units don't have as many strictures as public agencies and landlords who take people on rental assistance. If accommodation is cost-effective, however, landlords who provide improved access for the handicapped may find they are widening their market reach.

Whether a person can live independently is a question landlords sometimes ask people who are frail, who suffer from dementia associated with aging, or who have mental disabilities. Some of these are normal human concerns from a landlord, but there are legal pitfalls.

Suppose there is a handicapped-friendly unit on the ground floor and the tenant prefers a unit on the second floor because it is looks over the parking lot where the tenant can watch everybody come and go. The tenant wants that unit modified (at his expense), and wants permission to store one wheel chair under the stairs on the ground level and the other one out of the way against the railing outside the apartment.

Since the tenant can't carry the garbage down stairs he asks if the manager will take it to the dumpster when he cleans up the common areas.

Even though the landlord might worry how this person is going to get out quickly if there is a fire, it is discriminatory to refuse to accommodate these requests. After all, children on the second floor are also at risk.

Obviously there are some public relations issues to address with the other tenants in this scenario. Someone is going to have to explain why the wheel chair is under the stairs when others were told not to put their bikes there. The landlord needs to make the same explanations about the trash bag in the hall, the seeing eye dog in a "no pets" build­ing, and all the modifications going on in an apartment when the neighbor was just told he couldn't put up a room full of shelves.

The trick in making inquiries about people with special needs is to be consistent. There are legal risks in making extensive inquiries about some people whose status is legally protected while making little if any inquiries about others whose qualifications seem obvious.

None of these laws require landlords to accommodate or take tenants whose be­havior causes damage or is a danger to the safety of other tenants. What about the patient who just got out of Alaska Psychiatric Institute whose doctors diagnose him as a paranoid schizophrenic? "We don't think he should be living alone," they say. He wants your apart­ment and a social worker says your refusal to rent to him discriminates against his disabil­ity.

No so. The disability is not the issue; it's his conduct, for which he can be held re­sponsible.

A sad eviction was the family whose three year old was dying of leukemia. To compensate for the tragic events and the lack of attention he was getting, the ten year old brother was regularly beating up other kids in the complex.

After repeatedly warning the parents that they were responsible for the behavior of their older child the landlord evicted the family. The case in Maine attracted considerable adverse press, but the court had to agree the landlord was within his right to protect the children of the other tenants.