LAW: Judgments

What is reasonable accommodation?

U. S. District Court, Eastern Dist. of N.Y.
Bentley v. Peace & Quiet Realty 2 LLC, 2005

A federal court in New York has let a suit proceed to decide whether a disabled tenant’s request to move to a more accessible apartment in the same building for the same rent is reasonable.

Daphne Bentley was a 66-year-old cancer patient who lived on the fourth floor of a walk-up building in New York City. Under the New York City rent stabilization law, her rent was fixed at $820.64 per month. After several surgeries related to the disease made it difficult for her to climb stairs, Bentley asked her landlord if she could move to a ground-floor unit. The landlord agreed but informed Bentley that the rent would be $1,000.30 per month.

Bentley filed suit, alleging that the landlord’s failure to accommodate her disability violated the federal Fair Housing Act. She argued that these laws required the landlord to honor a request for reasonable accommodation.

Amendments to the Fair Housing Act prohibit “a refusal to make reasonable accommodations when such accommodations are necessary to afford an equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling.” What exactly constitutes a reasonable accommodation is determined on a case-by-case basis by evaluating the costs of the accommodation against the benefits to the disabled individual.

A U.S. District Court rejected the landlord’s argument that the dispute was about economics by pointing out that the Fair Housing Act requires that a landlord “incur reasonable costs to accommodate” a tenant’s handicap. For this reason, the court ruled that the suit to evaluate the reasonableness of the tenant’s request for accommodation should proceed.

No disclosure if there’s no knowledge

Nebraska Court of Appeals
Dinsmore v. Gateway Realty of McCook Inc., 2005

An appeals court has upheld a ruling that a brokerage and a salesperson weren’t guilty of concealment or negligence in failing to disclose that a house was a modified mobile home. In the case, Harvey and Roxanne Dinsmore purchased a home with the help of a salesperson. The salesperson told the Dinsmores that the home was a “modular structure” with additions. The salesperson also gave the couple a property disclosure statement completed by the sellers that stated the home was an “original modular structure [that] had been completely remodeled and added to.”

Following the closing, the buyers learned that the core of their house was a 1975 mobile home. The Dinsmores sued; they argued that the salesperson was negligent in not discovering that the residence was a rebuilt mobile home.

Although the salesperson had obtained information on the property from the assessor’s office that stated that the residence was a 1975 Westmont mobile home with an addition, he claimed he hadn’t read the documents until the suit was filed. The court found that the salesperson’s statements about his lack of knowledge were credible and didn’t demonstrate fraudulent concealment or misrepresentation. The court also rejected the buyers’ allegation of negligence because under Nebraska law, the salesperson has no independent duty to inspect the property or verify the disclosure.

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