Today, in a precedential opinion, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, affirmed the District Court’s dismissal of a complaint against my client that alleged that a multi-family building was constructed in violation of the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) design and accessibility requirements for disabled persons. A copy of the Opinion can be found here ( Opinion of 3rd Circuit. ) An adverse decision would have meant that my client could have been exposed to making several million dollars in alterations to its building.
A disabilities rights group filed a complaint against my client in the United States Federal District Court alleging that a multi-family (100+ units) building was constructed in violation of the FHA’s requirements for accessibility by disabled persons. The project was a multi-million dollar renovation of an old abandoned warehouse into a state of the art apartment building. The building was original constructed in 1912. Although FHA and Department of Justice guidelines made clear that the FHA’s requirements did not apply to any building originally constructed before 1988, even if the property was original built and occupied for commercial purposes. We filed a motion to dismiss the complaint which the District Court granted. The rights group then appealed.
As the Third Circuit points out in the its opinion, there was no controlling case law on this issue, even though the FHA’s guidelines had existed for nearly 25 years. The Third Circuit has now filed that void and issued a precedential opinion that says the FHA’s requirements indeed do not apply to building originally constructed before 1988 for any reason and then converted into residential use.
While the Court’s decision likely saved my client significant sums of money, it likely saved apartment developers and other building developers even more.