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Over the past few decades the US Postal Service stopped front-porch letter delivery to Renton’s older homes, and installed these cluster mailboxes instead. As crime surges and mailboxes are repeatedly broken into, the US postal service is backing away from responsibility for maintaining them.
Every week or so I see a facebook post in which a hapless homeowner is trying to figure out how they can receive their mail after their neighborhood’s “cluster” mailbox has been pried open by thieves. Often they are being told by the US Postal Service that it is up to their neighborhood to repair or replace the mailbox cluster, even if there is no homeowner’s association, and no individual even has data on who is getting mail there.
The post office has all the information and resources needed to do it themselves of course, but they are looking for ways to shift the burden under this policy on mailboxes which increasingly declares these cluster mailboxes “privately owned”. This makes some sense for an apartment complex or a subdivision where the box maintenance was formally transferred to a home owners’ association. But in an older neighborhood where no one was ever in charge and homes were originally built with mail slots or porch-mounted boxes, the post office apparently created no plan for this repair or replacement. It takes a resident willing to sleuth out who receives their mail there, find contact information for everyone affected, confer with the postal service, hire a contractor, ensure proper permits are in place, pay for the equipment and the installation in advance, collect funds for reimbursement, and somehow get keys to everyone impacted and to the post office. If one of the neighbors is a retired contractor, engineer or architect, with good cash reserves, good people skills and no language barriers, they can get this job done in a few months. If instead the neighborhood is comprised of people with full-time jobs, without extra cash or time on their hands, it can be hard to get this task done.
Most neighborhoods can eventually find someone to step up to this role once, but now some mailboxes are being broken into repeatedly, and neighbors are growing weary of fixing them. As US mail has become less relevant, with far more bulk-advertisements than personal content, some neighborhoods are taking longer to find someone willing to step up even if they have the time, skills, and money to do so.
Some local social media users have vented frustration that the Federal Government sets tampering with the mail as a felony, yet seemingly does very little locally to investigate these crimes or help the crime victims. From their perspective, the post office moved the mailbox off their porch, put it where it can’t be surveilled from their home, aren’t protecting it, and they’re now telling homeowners it’s the homeowener’s job to find out who else uses it and pay to fix it.
I’ve heard some neighborhoods have been successful at getting the post office to fix these boxes, while others have had to do it themselves. I personally have not found a specific federal policy that helps sort this out, and I suspect individual post office managers may be making judgement calls on who gets helped. (If someone has more information on this please leave it in the comments).
My view is that the post office should uniformly take responsibility for the boxes that they installed, or get used to the idea that an increasing number of homeowners will simply give up on receiving regular US Mail deliveries. That will be the next step toward the end for the US postal service as we’ve known it for centuries– a sad day indeed.
I’ve not previously seen this story covered by a local news outlet, but a Houston, Texas news source covered it here. Apparently it’s the same across the US. I agree with Houston author Amy Davis, especially where she says, “it’s a real cluster.”
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