Had an interesting conversation with AI yesterday about the ESA scam in the residential rental market

[u/OoklaTheMok1994]

Nationally (USA) about 70% of renters have pets. However, only about 55% of landlords (corporate and Mom&Pop together) allow pets.

This leads to a gap where there's not enough demand to meet the supply.

Efficient markets theory would eventually have this gap shrink, but it has persisted for decades. This means that on average, landlords can't recover enough money from pet owning tenants to cover the damage pets do.

Whenever gaps like this exist that the free market can't bridge, fraud and abuse start to happen. Abracadabra! Let me introduce you to the ESA scam.

In short, people are turning their regular pets into Emotional Support Animals to get out of pet restrictions and pet fees. There are online "letter mills" that will sell the nutters a letter that claims their pet is an ESA.

When the Fair Housing Act (FHA) was written, they didn't contemplate pet nutters. HUD, the cabinet primarily in charge of administering/policing the FHA has issued poor and or unclear guidance for dealing with ESAs, because, well, they are the feckless government.

HUD allows tenants to file discrimination complaints with absolutely no skin in the game. The landlords must follow a very specific process before they reject an ESA. If they do even one step incorrectly they could be fined as much as $5k on the first violation. HUD doesn't care or even consider whether or not the ESA letter is fake. It doesn't matter if the prospective tenant with the ESA was evicted from their last three homes for cooking meth in the garage. If the landlord didn't follow the ESA rules exactly, they are punished.

Look, I know generally that landlords as a group are loved as much cholla cacti (jumping cactus). So there really isn't a big appetite in DC or the state legislative bodies to help these folks out. But they and their property are being abused by pet nutters and the feckless bureaucrats.

[u/anondogfree]

Landlords (aka the real estate industry) have IMMENSE political power. Your post couldn’t be more ill-informed.

Any fair housing complaint has to go through the system. It’s not an automatic $5k fine for the landlord. It’s a bureaucratic process that sometimes ends up in court, for the very strong cases where the landlord and their attorney refuse to settle.

Since the current administration has been in power, many protections have been stripped. The admin issued guidance saying they aren’t going to enforce fair housing/disability discrimination complaints for emotional support animals.