Cohousing-L Mailing List: Common House Postal Mail

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

I want to have our postal mail, for 24 households, delivered to boxes in 
the foyer of the common house. And to design  or buy appropriate boxes 
for that use. 

I think this is especially important because we are building our common 
house after many people have already been living on site for years, and 
we need to do anything we can, to enhance the possibility that people 
will get into the habit of using the common house. 

It seems that making people enter the building (as opposed to a rank of 
mailboxes out in the common house parking lot, or several bunches of 
mailboxes here and there around the project) is a positive social move. 
In theory, anyway, they will come in "just to get their mail" and end up 
smelling what's cooking, hearing conversations, reading bulletin boards, 
getting hooked in one way or another into more interactions. 

We have designed the building with a generous entry hall, so space is not 
a significant limitation. There should be plenty of room in our 
entry/foyer for coats, internal cubbies, and postal mail receptacles. 

But what fills the bill well? One can buy the sort of ranks of mailboxes 
which are typical of apartment-building lobbies: they need to be unlocked 
with a key, many are smaller than the usual "rural" type box people are 
used to, and they look institutional. (And I imagine they aren't cheap.) 
The literature for such boxes states that they "meet or exceed" US Postal 
Service regulations. I suspect they exceed them, since regular boxes 
don't lock. 

People seem to value
having their box closed up, with only the postal carrier seeing what they 
are receiving
having a box which is as big as the rural letterbox, for catalogs, small 
parcels, etc. 

On the other hand, they'd like it not to be locked. 

What have other groups done, regarding postal mail? (At Puget Ridge I was 
surprised to see that the mail seems to get dropped off in a lump and 
sorted by a volunteer into hanging folders in a dairy crate!)  Does 
anyone know what the actual postal requirements are, for congregated 
boxes? (Our local postal employees don't know!)  Any clever home-made 
mail arrangements, that satisfy the PO? 

Did the PO require that everyone adopt the common-house address? At the 
moment, many of us have our mailboxes lined up in the parking lot by 
where the common house will be, and the PO valiantly delivers mail there, 
which is addressed to a dozen different street addresses, some of them 
blocks away!

Lynn Nadeau at RoseWind Cohousing, Port Townsend WA