USPS Sick of Curbside Mailboxes
Photo: mail late again
It should come as no surprise that “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” is not the official creed of the United States Postal Service.
The latest news is that the USPS is flexing its power and has adopted a policy that all new residential developments are required to have cluster-box (apartment-style) units. This is ALL developments, including single-family homes. This means that normal subdivisions cannot have curbside mailboxes and developers will instead have to set aside land, build buildings, provide electricity for lighting, purchase the box itself, and integrate homeowners association covenants into deeds to provide for the community mailbox’s continued management.
The USPS wants to lower costs, though it should be noted that they would never get away with this method of cost-lowering in a free market because the consumer wouldn’t stand for it. What is so insidious about this is that there is apparently no explicit regulation or law requiring community mailboxes. Instead, the USPS is capitalizing on the postal rule that no home mail delivery is required for new developments that are less than one-half occupied. People who are the first to move into a neighborhood are required to go and pick up their mail from the post office - which could last for years. The larger the neighborhood, the longer you’ll have to wait. Developers view this as a threat and make the community boxes out of fear that incoming landowners will resent not being allowed to get mail.
The outcome is that you have a building that is created for the convenience of the post office that must be maintained into perpetuity by a home owner’s association - it’s getting to the point in this country that you can’t buy a house without one of these things. Home owner’s associations impose an obligation on all those in a neighborhood to pay annual or monthly fees for the continued operation of common facilities. If you fail to pay your association fee, the association can put a lien on your house and sell it from under you.
First the USPS mandates a common area, which leads to home owners association, which leads to home owner association members who want to raise the fees to put in a tennis court or community pool, leading to the ultimate outcome that most Americans will be paying a non-trivial “rent” just to live in their own homes.
The USPS is very adept at using their postal rules, having recently taken advantage of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of entire neighborhoods.
In the ruined old neighborhoods of New Orleans now being rebuilt, USPS is refusing to deliver to homes that do not have curbside mailboxes, even if they had door-to-door delivery before Hurricane Katrina. In many of these neighborhoods, the service is refusing to deliver to houses at all and erecting “temporary” [cluster box units] instead.
The postal service plays both sides of the fence, being a government agency or privateering enterprise, whenever it suits them. The postal service needs competition (a good read if you’re interested in the impact of a free market on mail).
For further reading: Some homeowners left longing for door-to-door mail service, USPS looks to union to help curb costs and avoid contracting, National Association of Home Builders policy statement on the U.S. mail, Cluster Boxes Replacing Door-to-Door Mail Delivery.
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