The United States Post Office has been attempting to reduce or eliminate sidewalk and curbside delivery of mail to individual homes, especially in new subdivisions. Instead, the Post Office now wants to deliver mail primarily to centralized or “cluster” mailboxes, each serving multiple homes in a development.
So far, implementation of this policy has varied across the country, as local post offices were initially given considerable discretion on the matter. The March HMI question asked builders simply if they had encountered cluster mailbox requirements imposed by the local post office in any of the subdivisions where they have built homes. In response, 64 percent of builders said yes, they had encountered cluster mailbox requirements, and 36 percent said no.
Encounters with cluster mailboxes have been particularly common in the West Census Region. In the March HMI survey, 95 percent of builders in the West reported encountering cluster mailbox requirements—compared to 59 percent in the Northeast and Midwest, and 54 percent in the South.
2 Responses
Is NAHB doing anything about cluster mailboxes? Last year, 2017, was the first time that this has become an issue for single family homes in Columbus Ohio.
NAHB has been actively following this issue and recently updated the online Mailbox Delivery Toolkit on .org to explain evolving USPS guidance on cluster mailboxes. We are currently assessing a variety of legislative, legal, and policy strategies that we will be reporting on at the Midyear Meeting in Portland.