The federal law making it unlawful to refuse housing, or set different terms, because of who someone is.
The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to refuse to rent or sell housing, to set different terms or conditions, to advertise a preference, or to falsely represent that housing is unavailable, because of a protected characteristic. The characteristics protected federally are race, colour, religion, sex, familial status - broadly, having children in the household - national origin, and disability. Many states and cities protect further characteristics, and where they do, the local law adds to the federal floor rather than replacing it.
Disability is treated differently from the others, and this is the part most often not known. A housing provider must make reasonable accommodations - changes to rules, policies or services, such as permitting an assistance animal where a no-pets rule applies - and must permit reasonable modifications, meaning physical changes to the unit, generally at the tenant's expense. These are affirmative duties: doing nothing is not neutrality, it is a potential violation.
Discrimination in these cases is rarely explicit. It is far more often established by circumstance: the unit that becomes unavailable on the phone and available to a different caller, the different deposit, the rule applied to one family and not another. That is why testing evidence and contemporaneous records carry so much weight.
Two enforcement routes exist and they run in parallel: an administrative complaint to HUD or a substantially equivalent state or local agency, which investigates at no cost to the complainant, and a private civil action in court. Each has its own filing deadline set by the statute; this page states neither, and both are shorter than people assume.
The deadlines are the reason not to wait, and they differ between the administrative and the court route, so the choice is worth making deliberately rather than by default. The administrative route costs the complainant nothing to pursue, which makes it the practical option for most people. Local fair housing organisations and legal aid programmes handle these cases and can also arrange testing - the evidence that most reliably converts a suspicion into a provable claim. Keep the advertisement, the messages and a dated note of what was said and by whom.
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