New York Department of Health (DOH) regulations provide that an adult home may not admit additional residents with serious mental illness if it has a capacity of 80 or more beds and its resident population is over 25% persons with serious mental illness.  In Oceanview Home for Adults, Inc. v. Zucker, the New York Court of Appeals held that these regulations do not facially discriminate against persons with disabilities. 

In 1999, the United State Supreme Court held that the Americans with Disabilities Act imposes an affirmative obligation on states to prevent the segregation of persons with disabilities in institutionalized settings that are more restrictive than appropriate for their needs.  In October of 2012, New York’s Office of Mental Health (OMH) issued two Clinical Advisories stating that certain large adult homes provided housing experiences for persons with serious mental illness that were not clinically appropriate to their needs and were not conducive to their rehabilitation or recovery.  Shortly thereafter, DOH issued the challenged regulations. 

DOH cited Oceanview Home for Adults in 2016 for admitting persons with serious mental illness in violation of the regulations.  Oceanview sued, alleging that the restriction on admission of residents with serious mental illness violated the Fair Housing Act (FHA).  Congress had amended the FHA in 1988 to add disability as a protected class, making it unlawful, inter alia, to make unavailable or deny housing because of a disability.  The Court of Appeals upheld the regulations because they did not deny or make unavailable housing based on a person’s disability. 

The Court of Appeals gave significant weight to the OMH conclusion that large adult homes “are not clinically appropriate settings for the significant number of persons with serious mental illnesses who reside in such settings, nor are they conducive to the rehabilitation or recovery of such persons.”  As DOH licenses the adult homes, the Court viewed the regulations as an admission bar based on the proportion of residents with serious mental illness in those facilities, in line with OMH’s professional judgment.  The Court determined that the regulations further the goal of ending unnecessary exclusion of persons with disabilities by giving those individuals greater ability to exercise autonomy and interact with individuals without serious medical illness.  In addition, the Court noted that disability services are subject to various conditions and limitations, and the State frequently relies on the reasonable medical judgment of public health officials on how best to administer such services.

This case will be helpful to arguments that courts should defer to the reasonable medical judgment of state officials in determining the propriety of regulatory actions.