Cohousing-L Mailing List: Urban cohousing: Common house on roof?

[Joelyn Malone (JKMalone]

I'm responding to this quote from Jaonie Blank:
"Or you could just not tell them the P.O, and trust someone in your group to
remove the mail from the conventional "boxes" where they are delivered now
and distribute it to people's boxes upstairs. [end quote]

 "I would be uneasy about the USPS delivering mail to a master mailbox and
someone in the group distributing it to per-unit mailboxes. This would be a
lot of work, and he/she would have to do it on time six days a week. There
is also a privacy issue. I think the only practical way to do it would be to
put the mailroom, including a conversation area, on the first floor and
relying on things other than picking up mail to draw people to the rooftop
CH." 

Here at Monterey Cohousing,MN we have one big mailbox (the rural delivery kind, with  a flag you 
put up if you want them to pick up outgoing mail)near the front entrance to our community, where 
the USPS delivers mail to all 15 households. We have a "crew" that rotates the job of 
sorting mail into our individual mail boxes in the commons house. It works quite well, with the 
added benefit that we can put things for eachother in the commons house mail boxes too. (Meeting 
notes, proposals, stray socks, etc.) Only once have we ever had anyone so concerned about privacy 
that they didn't want to participate this way, and that was someone renting a unit from an absentee 
owner until the owner could find a buyer. We just put a "sattelite" mailbox for that one 
unit temporarily.

I think that would be better than having an individual remove mail from all the 
boxes downstairs, since it is illegal to do that. (Probaby there are ways to 
make it legal, involving signed permission papers - that's beyond my 
experience.)
-- Joelyn at Cohousing Advocates