South Dakota Housing Authority Rental Preference for Veterans

Section 11-7-63 is short and has been on the books since 1950. As between applicants equally in need and eligible for occupancy of a dwelling at the rent involved, preference shall be given to families of servicemen, including families of servicemen who died in service, and to families of veterans as defined in 33A-2-1, except as otherwise required by federal law in contracts for federal financial assistance. Three things follow. The preference is a tie-breaker rather than a queue-jump: it operates only between applicants equally in need and equally eligible at the same rent. It runs on the broad state definition of veteran, so a Guard member who served an obligation is inside it. And the federal carve-out matters in practice, because most housing authority stock in South Dakota operates under federal contracts whose own preference rules take precedence. Section 11-7-66 waives the admission condition in 11-7-65(1) for the family of a service member, the family of a veteran as defined in 33A-2-1, or the family of a service member who died in the armed forces, where the application is made within any time limit specified by federal law applicable to federal financial assistance for the project. The obligation runs to a housing authority created under chapter 11-7, that is, a municipal or county housing and redevelopment commission, rather than to a private landlord. South Dakota has no statutory rental preference or source-of-income protection binding a private landlord for veterans or for VA housing vouchers. For homeownership, South Dakota Housing runs a first-time homebuyer program with income limits and a purchase price ceiling, currently $410,000, and offers a veterans waiver of the first-time buyer requirement that a lender applies. The terms of that waiver are not published on the authority's own eligibility page and have to be obtained from a participating lender, so this catalog records that it exists rather than what it says.