Cohort forming
Reasonable Accommodation Demand Letter
Help a tenant with a disability ask their landlord to change a rule they cannot follow, in a letter that sets out the request and the law behind it.
Help a tenant with a disability ask their landlord to change a rule they cannot follow, in a letter that sets out the request and the law behind it.
This page is the shared target for this situation. Any court, legal aid office, or builder working on it in their own region can take the vision, the blueprints, and the standards here instead of starting over, and set the parts that are local to them. The point is that the same work is not designed from scratch in every county.
Does this match how it goes where you are? Leave a note on this workflow.
A tenant with a disability needs their landlord to change a rule they cannot follow. The requests that arrive include waiving a no pets policy, waiving a pet fee, waiving an income requirement, moving a rent due date, moving an assigned parking space closer to the unit, and accepting a form in another format. A clear letter setting out the request and the law behind it often settles the matter without a complaint or a case.
These letters follow a formula: the date and the header, the salutation, the opening, the paragraph on the disability, the accommodation request, the legal basis, the documentation and the deadline, and the closing. That is what makes drafting one by machine possible, and it is also what makes any variation easy to spot.
The work before the letter is an interview. Somebody has to find out which rule the tenant cannot follow, how the disability affects their use of the home, what change they want, and why the disability makes that change necessary. The connection between the disability and the request is what the letter rests on.
The interview opens with the landlord’s rule rather than with the tenant’s disability, because the question the letter answers is which rule the tenant cannot follow. Opening the other way turns the conversation into an inventory of somebody’s health. No medical documentation is asked for, and the tenant’s own account of their disability is what goes in.
No letter reaches a landlord without an attorney reading it, and the attorney speaks to the tenant before it goes. That conversation is where a misunderstanding in the interview gets caught.
A staff member takes the call, works out that a demand letter is the right step, interviews the tenant, and writes the letter by hand from the office’s examples. Where an office has no capacity for that work, these letters do not get written at all, and the tenant is left to ask for the change on their own.
The intake conversation a person has already had carries into the interview, so the tenant is not asked the same questions twice. The interview runs in the tenant’s language, opens with the rule rather than the disability, and collects what the letter needs without asking for medical documentation. The draft follows the office’s own structure and cites only the statutes that office uses. An attorney reads the draft beside the full transcript, speaks to the tenant, and approves it before it goes anywhere.
This is one vision, taken from a working prototype and from the letters a legal aid office writes by hand today. Technology could play out in other ways here, and the cohort weighs them against this one.
Who this serves: Tenants with disabilities asking a landlord to change a rule, the intake staff and advocates who take those calls, the attorneys who review and sign the letters, and the offices deciding whether they can write these letters at all.
Where this came from: A working prototype of a letter drafting assistant, two rounds of testing on it, and the example letters a legal aid office writes by hand. This page is built from those materials, including what the testing found did not work. The cohort for this area picks it up from here.
A tenant facing a problem with their housing often has more than one of these at once. These are the workflows around this one, with the point where each one hands over.
Problems with living conditions in your rentalAsking a landlord to change a rule and asking a landlord to repair a condition are different requests with different law behind them. The repairs workflow covers the second. Answering an eviction caseA landlord who refuses an accommodation and moves to evict puts the refusal in front of a court. The answer is where the tenant sets out the defenses their situation supports.The step-by-step agenda is open for review now. The cohort writes the functional agenda and the standards from the answers that come back, and this page carries them when they exist.
What a tool here has to do, written as the work in order and in plain words, with the question the Commons team wants answered about each part. Start here if you write these letters and want to say what a tool needs.
Read the step-by-step agenda →What the system must do, from the decision that a letter is the right step, through the interview, the drafting, the attorney review, and what gets logged once it is running. Findings from the testing belong in the specification: an answer of not sure must not end the interview, speech recognition must never be trusted with a name, an address, or an email address that is already on file, and the tool must never name a diagnosis the tenant did not name.
How anyone judges whether a builder did this well: whether the letter matches the structure and the citations the office already uses, whether every fact in it came from the tenant, how much the attorney corrects before approving, and how many interviews people abandon part way through.
The rest of the package follows once those two exist. It covers the baseline numbers, the procurement and contract terms, the reference architecture, which says what any jurisdiction can take as it is and what each place has to set for itself, the stories and materials from teams who have already built something here, and the tests.
The housing cohort is forming now, and this is one of the workflows in front of it. Members bring what they have seen in their own practice, argue about what a tool here has to do, and read the drafts.