The Wolf and Kline lawsuit is over. A tenant at a Lancaster County apartment complex sued Wolf & Kline Property Management Inc., the property’s owner, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February 2025 after her request for a designated outdoor smoking area was denied. Her Fair Housing Act claim against the landlord ended in a confidential settlement, and on April 10, 2026, a federal judge dismissed her remaining constitutional claim against HUD with prejudice.
The Accommodation Request That Started the Case
Susan Lloyd rented at Paradise Meadows, a Gordonville, Pennsylvania apartment community managed by Wolf & Kline. On October 29, 2024, she asked management to designate an outdoor smoking area, saying that neighbors smoking near her building was aggravating her asthma.
Wolf & Kline denied the request the following day. The company told Lloyd that Paradise Meadows was not a smoke-free community and that carving out a designated smoking area for one resident did not meet the legal standard for a reasonable accommodation under fair housing law.
Lloyd filed a complaint with HUD’s Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Office on November 7, 2024. FHEO dismissed it on November 20, 2024, concluding that the request would require creating an entirely new policy rather than modifying an existing one, which put it outside the definition of a reasonable accommodation. FHEO also noted that Paradise Meadows receives no federal housing subsidies, which limited HUD’s authority over the property.
How Wolf & Kline Exited the Lawsuit
Lloyd filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on February 13, 2025, naming Wolf & Kline Property Management, Paradise Meadows LLC, HUD, the law firm McNees Wallace and Nurick LLC, attorney Gregory Archibald, and contractor Eagle Lawn Care LLC. She represented herself.
Wolf & Kline, Paradise Meadows LLC, McNees Wallace and Nurick, and Archibald were all terminated from the case on May 29, 2025. Eagle Lawn Care was terminated on June 22, 2025.
The court later noted that Lloyd had separately pursued a Fair Housing Act claim against the landlord, and that proceeding ended in a settlement. The terms were not disclosed in any public filing. After those exits, only HUD remained.
Why the Claim Against HUD Was Dismissed
In the federal action Lloyd clarified that her sole cause of action was a “class of one” Equal Protection claim under the Fifth Amendment. Her theory was that HUD violated her constitutional rights by refusing to pursue her administrative complaint.
Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl granted HUD’s motion to dismiss on April 10, 2026, with prejudice. The opinion rested on three independent grounds.
On the Equal Protection claim, Lloyd needed to show that the government treated her differently from similarly situated people without any rational basis. Her comparisons were to HUD investigations involving properties that received federal housing subsidies. Paradise Meadows did not. That gave HUD a rational reason for declining to investigate, and the claim failed.
On jurisdiction, the court held that the Administrative Procedure Act allows judicial review only when a person has “no other adequate remedy in a court.” Because Lloyd could sue, and did sue, the landlord directly under the Fair Housing Act, she had an alternative path, and APA review of HUD’s decision was foreclosed.
On reviewability, the court applied the settled principle that an agency’s decision not to pursue enforcement is committed to its discretion and carries a strong presumption against judicial review. HUD’s choice not to investigate a particular complaint was not the kind of decision a federal court will second-guess.
Lloyd filed a motion to vacate the judgment under Rule 60(b). HUD opposed the motion on April 20, 2026. No further activity has been recorded on the docket.
Smoking Areas and Reasonable Accommodations
The dispute sits in an unsettled area of fair housing law. Under the Fair Housing Act, landlords must make reasonable changes to rules or policies when a tenant with a disability needs them for equal use of housing. Requests that would fundamentally alter the housing provider’s operations or impose an undue burden can be denied.
HUD’s 2017 guidance on smoke-free public housing does not require housing providers to create designated smoking areas, though it permits them. The guidance states there is no legal right to smoke in a rental home and that smokers are not a protected class. Disability status is evaluated case by case, based on the underlying condition rather than the smoking habit itself.
Federal courts have generally been reluctant to order smoking-related policy changes as accommodations. In Davis v. Echo Valley Condominium Association, a 2019 Sixth Circuit decision, the court held that requiring a condominium association to ban smoking entirely was a fundamental alteration of the existing policy, not a reasonable accommodation, and that a ban would intrude on the rights of other residents who had long been permitted to smoke in their units.
Lloyd’s request pointed the other direction. She wanted smoking concentrated in a specific area rather than banned. Both FHEO and Wolf & Kline concluded that creating a new designated smoking area at a property with no smoke-free policy amounted to establishing a new rule rather than adjusting an existing one, and treated the request as outside the reasonable-accommodation framework.