A woman is flying high with a six-figure settlement after she was evicted from her New York City co-op apartment due to keeping emotional support parrots.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has ordered the building to pay the complainant $165,000 in damages. It must also offer to pay her $585,000 to purchase her shares in the co-op, above the $500,000 value of similar units in the complex.
In a press release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office says that the woman “maintained parrots in her home as emotional support animals to assist her with her disabilities and did so without incident until March 2015, when one of her neighbors began complaining about alleged noise.” Despite the NYC Department of Environmental Projection visiting the building 15 times over the next year, it “issued zero notices of noise violations.”
After the woman put in a request to keep her parrots as support animals under the Fair Housing Act in March 2016, the building began eviction proceedings against her two months later, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“This is the largest recovery the Department of Justice has ever obtained for a person with disabilities whose housing provider denied them their right to have an assistance animal,” says U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “This outcome should prompt all housing providers to consider carefully whether their policies and procedures comply with federal law.”
Or, in other words, if you squawk at the law, the law squawks back.