Confused About Whether the Americans with Disabilities Act AND Fair Housing Act Apply to Your Property? Youíre Not Alone.

Many housing providers assume that ADA requirements overlap fair housing requirements more than they actually do

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Fair Housing Act (FHA) share many similarities - e.g. both statutes outlaw discrimination against individuals with disabilities, require reasonable accommodations and modifications in certain circumstances, mandate features of accessible design and construction, and so forth. Yet despite what many housing providers (and their lawyers) think, these laws are fundamentally different in the way they apply to housing providers, as attorneys for a disabled plaintiff in a federal district court case in California recently learned.

In the California case, a housing advocacy group sued a condo association on behalf of a mobility impaired unit owner claiming that the owner was denied a reasonable accommodation when the association refused to provide her with a reserved parking space. Like many lawsuits of this kind, the advocacy group claimed damages under both the FHA and ADA. Soon after the lawsuit was filed, however, the court summarily dismissed the ADA claim. Why?

For one thing, the court recognized that the FHA prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in residential housing, while the ADA prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in ìpublic accommodations.î For housing providers this means that leasing offices and other areas of a condo or apartment complex open to the general public are covered by the ADA, while the individual condo or apartment units themselves are covered by the FHA. As for reasonable accommodations, the California court also recognized that the FHA requires housing providers to reasonably accommodate their residents, while the ADA requires housing providers to reasonably accommodate their employees (but only if they have 15 or more employees).

While these distinctions are important to know, they may be small comfort to the condo association in the California court which must continue to defend itself from the plaintiffís FHA claims.