By: David A. Smith
A penny saved is a penny earned.
– Benjamin Franklin, Postmaster General
When were you last inside a post office?
Think back. When was the last time you actually went down to the physical post office for any reason – and what motivated you to go?
2000 ALLSTON WAY, BERKELEY, CALIF.
This 1915 building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has a tile-roofed Renaissance design. Marble columns support the vaulted arches over the main entrance.
My own last visit was probably two years ago, when to my great annoyance I had to collect a letter someone had sent certified mail, return receipt requested, instead of using one of the many door-to-door pickup-and-dropoff services that have rendered the post office’s parcel delivery services largely anachronistic and irrelevant. … as profiled in a credulous and sympathetic article by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times (March 8, 2013) and the subsequent comments section (green Arial):
The Postal Service lost $15.9 billion last year –
Capitalize that deficit at (say) a 5% cap rate and the Post Office represents a $320 billion sinkhole.
– and last month announced it was considering eliminating Saturday letter service. It says that the real estate sales raise revenue and save on operating costs, and that the shuttered post offices are those where the number of customers had declined, or where it found a less-expensive alternate site.
Naturally enough, it was easy to find people who want to preserve the post offices, either by interviewing those (mostly elderly) who happened to be inside the post office when the reporter went by, or by seeking out the preservationists – two groups for whom the government’s economic issues are secondary – and the discussion that ensues often breaks along lines of philosophy and values:
Urban versus rural
Future versus past
Numbers versus feelings
And these would be arguable, except for the bankruptcy/ deficits angles.
“There are lots of quite significant post office buildings that are threatened because the Postal Service itself is threatened,” said G. Martin Moeller Jr., a senior curator at the National Building Museum in Washington.
The National Building Museum is itself a fantastic if entirely non-functional building: worth a visit
When it comes to shuttering post offices, like closing churches, the defenders are emotional, the proponents rational, but the issues can be divided into five large questions:
1. Should the Post Office be closing buildings?
Very few enterprises have names that bespeak real estate ownership as an inherent element of their business proposition, but we have the post office – a physical place. Hence the decision to close post offices strikes at the heart of what the entity is and what it does.
A microcosm of the Federal budget?
Background: Those who oppose closing post offices claim that the post office’s money-losing figures are eyewash, inflated by the Congressional requirement that the Post Office fund its pension liabilities on an actuarial basis, instead of the pay-as-you-go model.
I have read that the difference is as much as $8 billion annually, which is plausible given that the Post Office has – are you ready for this? – 574,000 employees.
FTS from California
I’m of two minds here. The USPS is in trouble, I read, because of outrageous demands put upon it by Congress related to its pensions. People declare that the postal service should be allowed to make its own decisions and not be forced to work within rules created by others. But then, when it wants to make its own decisions — selling off properties it deems excess — people declare that USPS shouldn’t be allowed to sell off these wonderful community resources. I’m exaggerating on both ends of the story, and there is some cause/effect here, but it seems like some folks want the USPS to operate on its own until they don’t like its choices.
[Welcome to punditry, FTS – you have accurately summed up the operating thesis behind many laws and regulations. – Ed.]
Postal volume peaked in 2006 and has declined 20% since then, though it’s still a mind-boggling 160 billion pieces annually, which when laid against roughly 115 million households and 27 million companies means the average mail respondent receives a little over 1,000 pieces of mail annually, or roughly five pieces per weekday. Because the Post Office operates without subsidy, a $16 billion operating loss (23% of the $70 billion in annual revenue) is clearly an unsustainable bleed rate, and as cutting back on the work force will be the most contentious issue, the Post Office is moving first on its ‘surplus’ buildings.
558 GRAND CONCOURSE, BRONX
This 1935 building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and features tall arched windows and a gallery of work by Ben Shahn, a leading Social Realist artist.
There are some 31,000 retail postal offices in the country, most of them leased. But roughly a quarter are government-owned and as many as 1,100 were built in the 1930s, when the government hired architects to design civic buildings.
In 2011, the Postal Service identified about 3,700 post offices — some leased, some owned, some historic and some not — that it said may have to close in coming years to save money. When that plan met with opposition, the service announced it would instead try to lower expenses by reducing operating hours.
[Here’s a thought experiment for the preservationists – if by laying of (say) 125 postal workers, the building could remain a post office indefinitely, would you want the government to do it? – Ed.]
In one case, a post office built in 1937 without protected status was demolished. That building, in Virginia Beach, was knocked down in 2009 to make room for a Walgreens, despite attempts to save it.
Virginia Beach post office demolished in 2009
Did those ‘efforts to save it’ include buying the building?
[Editorial note: a huge oil canvas mural from 1939 was relocated – Ed.]
The battles over the buildings seem most pronounced here in California, where preservationists say they fear dozens of post offices may be sold.
Dozens sold; the horror.
Postal officials said such concerns were unfounded because there was no such plan at this point in the state.
Nonetheless, concerns about the post offices “are overwhelming the state historic preservation offices,” said Carol Lemlein, president of the Santa Monica Conservancy.
Carol Lemlein at a charity event
“There is very little confidence in the Postal Service’s ability to execute a process in a manner that will really protect the buildings,” she added.
What is Ms. Lemlein’s definition of ‘protecting’ the buildings? Keeping them in exactly their current condition and use? If so, who will pay the costs of upkeep for these struldbrugs?
Last week, residents of Berkeley, Calif., rallied to protest the possible sale of their main post office, while Glendale, Palo Alto and La Jolla have also seen efforts to protest the possible sales of older post offices.
It’s perhaps understandable that it is university towns (Berkeley, Palo Alto) and affluent suburbs (Glendale, La Jolla) that can bring forward activists who want things to be kept the way they have been. Still, citizen activism has always been part of the vibrancy of the American political experience, and this is more relevant when there are clashes between levels of government (local versus national) over how to handle zoning and land/ property use issues – and that raises the second question.
380 HAMILTON AVENUE, PALO ALTO, CALIF.
This 1933 building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, features an open arcaded section of eight bays with round arches. There are ornamental bronze transoms above the double entrance doors at either end of the building.
2. Does the public have a vested interest in the use of currently-public buildings?
Obviously, those who advocate believe the public – which in their view theoretically means everyone, but in practice means the opponents of change – does have a legitimate vested interest in what happens to these buildings, a supposition tacitly endorsed by the Times’s reporter:
In Ukiah, Calif., a post office on the National Register was sold last August to a private developer despite opposition from area residents. No plan for the building has been announced.
1215 31ST STREET NW, WASHINGTON
This 1858 building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was designed in the Renaissance Revival-Italian Palace style, with an elaborate stone cornice that crowns the building.
The phrase ‘despite opposition’ presupposes the opposition has standing, is representative of the greater populace, and speaks for the greater populace. None of these postulates is examined, much less proven, in the Times article, which simply takes them as givens and particularizes the issue by choosing one post office to stand for all, and one customer to speak for all.
Santa Monica, Calif. — The lines are often long inside the Art Deco post office here under the palm trees. But [the people the reporter observed] are glad to get their mail, send off a package and maybe chat a bit while they still can.
Climbing down from the rhetorical rampants (“chat a bit while they still can”?), we can observe that for most of us, the modern post office is Starbucks or McDonald’s: you drop in, buy a coffee or an Egg McMuffin, power up your laptop or iPad, and get your mail – personalized communications (email), magazines and periodicals (web sites), and the ubiquitous junk mail (spam).
Oneofakind from Somers, NY
The post office was established by our founding fathers through an Act of Congress. Can they (whoever “they” are) really ride roughshod over it?
A national, Federally run Post Office was authorized (not mandated) in the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7) to empower Congress “to establish post offices and post roads.” In other words, the Framers envisioned delivery of information as an important national priority, as they did delivery of goods and people (recall that this was before the invention of railroads). Being authorized to create a national post office is not the same, however, as mandating it, and so Congress has periodically restructured the post office’s authority, and its de-appropriation forty years ago clearly signaled Congress’s move away from the mails as the irreplaceable form of interpersonal communication. The US does not operate a national telephone company, or national broadband service, so our acceptance of a nationalized post office derives from our childhood memories of it – it’s always been a government branch – and not, as far as I can tell, from an inherent quality of mail delivery placing it beyond the private marketplace.
Josh Kornbluth, in character as Ben Franklin, speaking to protesters fighting the possible sale of a post office in Berkeley, Calif. The office is one of about 200 that the Postal Service might sell.
Though he was postmaster, Ben Franklin seems a singularly inapt symbolic defender of unnecessary post offices, since he took the job only to make money: “ ‘I accepted it readily,’ says Franklin in his Autobiography, ‘and found it of great advantage; for, tho’ the salary was small, it facilitated the correspondence that improved my newspaper.’ “
“When you run in debt, you give to another power over your liberty.”
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]