The manufactured-housing half

The same Act amended the “comparable housing” definition at 25 Del. C. § 7102(2), in the chapter governing manufactured home community conversion and relocation. Comparable housing — “a dwelling place or manufactured home community site” — must now be “[o]pen to all persons regardless of race, creed, national origin, ancestry, marital status, sex, or any other [basis protected under Chapter 46 of Title 6].”

That is the definition used when residents are displaced by a community's conversion or closure, so it governs what a relocation offer has to be. It matters in practice: the Delaware Manufactured Home Relocation Authority's own board minutes record active change-of-use cases affecting more than 130 households across three communities.

What this actually means for a board

Three concrete things, and none of them requires a lawyer to start.

Read your rules against the current list, not the one you remember. The Delaware protected classes are now longer than most declarations were drafted against, and the catch-all means the list is no longer static. A rule that was written when the list was shorter is not grandfathered.

Look hardest at occupancy standards. This is the exposed category. An occupancy cap tighter than the applicable building or housing code, or one that counts children differently from adults, is the first thing a discrimination theory reaches — and it does so under federal law regardless of what Delaware codifies. A Delaware bill that would have made this explicit passed the House 26-12 and died in the Senate in June 2026, so the theory is available without being codified.

Keep the accommodation track separate from the enforcement track. Where an owner raises a disability accommodation against an architectural or fence restriction, engage the request on its own merits and document that engagement, separately from the enforcement decision. Our Delaware architectural review page sets out the discretion a board has; the Act constrains how it is exercised.

What Delaware courts did in the same period — and its limit

The litigation ran the other way from the legislation, and the distinction is important enough to state precisely.

In August 2025 the Superior Court held that the Noerr-Pennington doctrine immunises covenant-enforcement litigation from Fair Housing Act liability — the first Delaware case applying that doctrine to a civil rights statute. Continuing to prosecute a deed-restriction suit is protected petitioning activity, even after the owner asserts a reasonable accommodation.

That protects the lawsuit. It does not protect the decision. A refusal to grant an accommodation, a rule applied selectively against a protected class, or a fine imposed because of a protected characteristic remain squarely actionable. Reading that case as a general fair-housing shield would be a serious error, and it is the error a board is most likely to make from a headline.

The same court also held that the Superior Court cannot issue an injunction under the Delaware Fair Housing Act — injunctive jurisdiction is exclusively the Court of Chancery's. An accommodation claim seeking to override a recorded restriction has to be brought there.

Where this fits in the session

These two Acts are among the small number of enacted 153rd General Assembly measures that reach Delaware associations at all, and neither is a community-association bill. They arrived through the Fair Housing Act and a ten-title alignment bill respectively, while the two bills that would have amended DUCIOA directly died in their first committee.

What to watch next

The catch-all is the thing to monitor, because it removes the warning. Previously, a new protected class reaching the landlord-tenant provisions required a bill that named them. Now a change to 6 Del. C. ch. 46 alone does it. Any such change lands in Chapter 46, not Title 25.

No reported Delaware decision has yet applied “military status” to a community association's rule, and the scope of the § 4606(l) safe harbour is untested.