Douglas v. Kriegsfeld Corp., 884 A.2d 1109 (2005)

Citation: Douglas v. Kriegsfeld Corp., 884 A.2d 1109 (2005)
Parent Document: Douglas v. Kriegsfeld Corp., 884 A.2d 1109 (2005)
Jurisdiction: DC (municipal)
Effective Date: 2005-10-13
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1472683/douglas-v-kriegsfeld-corp/ ↗

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More fundamentally, any failure of the landlord to pursue a dialogue with Ms. Douglas and her counsel was legally immaterial because the landlord was not responsible for Ms. Douglas’s failure to “fill in the details” and the landlord had no duty to fill in the details itself. The “details” that were necessary depended not on information to be supplied by the landlord, but on information that needed to come from Ms. Douglas herself, the District government, and its cleaning contractor. A landlord’s failure to open and maintain a dialogue with a tenant may be material, and can *1163result in liability under the Fair Housing Act for discrimination, if it thwarts the development, presentation or evaluation of the tenant’s request for a reasonable accommodation and operates as a disingenuous excuse for not granting that request.6 Cf Jankowski Lee & Assocs. v. Cisneros, 91 F.3d 891, 895 (7th Cir.1996) (“Petitioners’ denial of Rusinov’s request based on their lack of knowledge of the extent of his injury is simply a ruse to avoid the penalty for violating the FHA.... If a landlord is skeptical of a tenant’s alleged disability or the landlord’s ability to provide an accommodation, it is incumbent upon the landlord to request documentation or open a dialogue.”). But Ms. Douglas makes no plausible claim that her landlord’s inaction frustrated her efforts to provide the requisite specifics for her accommodation request. Ms. Douglas simply needed to work with the District to produce a reasonable cleaning plan that the government would commit to fund and carry out, or at the very least a firm timetable for the District to develop and commit to such a plan; except insofar as her disappearance probably made it impossible,7 it remains an unexplained mystery why her counsel and the District failed to do the necessary work by the time of trial. In this mystery, the landlord had no part.8

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