In a small town near me on the California coast there is a small post office with what seems to be a residential apartment on the second floor. There is a balcony with lawn furniture and barbecue equipment on it, and the window layout seems more typical of a residence than an office. I’ve never seen this before and I’m wondering what the situation is. Is the tenant renting this place from the post office? (Do they do that?) Is the building owned by someone else and both the PO and the tenant are renting from them? (Does the PO ever rent their buildings from third parties? Seems odd since a typical PO building doesn’t really seem suitable for anything except being a post office.) Is this a residence for the postmaster provided by the PO? (Is that common?) Could there have been some kind of grandfather clause that required the PO to provide someone with a residence when they built the building?
I know no one on this board can give a definitive answer without more details, but am I missing any obvious possibilities? None of the options I’ve thought of seem particularly likely. BTW, the building is in an awesome location for a residence, about 100 yards from the beach with the balcony overlooking the ocean.
There are a fair number of odd Post Offices around the country and a number of them in California alone. Not all Post Offices are single use and look like government buildings. Some of them are multi-function.
Yes, small towns can definitely have weird post offices. My brother’s post office is basically an annex attached to the postmaster’s house. They don’t do delivery, everyone has a PO box, and picks up their own mail.
When I was in grade school, one field trip was a tour of the post office in this small town (about 12,000 residents). We saw the front counter, the post office boxes and the back area where the mail was sorted into pigeonholes for each house and loaded into trucks for delivery. Now, decades later, the sorting is done at a larger post office in a neighboring city and the trucks are dispatched from there, and the small town post office just has the counter service and the post office boxes. Much of the building seems to be unused. And I think this consolidation is common. So in such cases, they can sell off these buildings (some of which are historic or valuable real estate) and set up post offices in any rented space, perhaps in a strip mall.
I think in some places the post office is actually in a CVS pharmacy or similar store.
It’s common enough for the PO to rent space in office buildings. Sharing a small residential building probably is not very common, but I suppose there is probably no prohibition on renting such a space.
The other tenant in the building probably gets deliveries fast.
In a lot of small towns in Alaska the post office is just a contract with an person in town. They’re not federal employees and it’s not a federal building. Of the two that come to mind, one was in a gas station, the other in a residential house.
Apparently the post office leases over 25,000 spaces in the U.S. It’s not shocking that one or two of them are in a mixed-use commercial/residential facility.
In a few of the small towns (300 people or less) here in South Dakota, the post office is just a converted mobile home. I haven’t seen any that are in a person’s house or a leased space in another building but I haven’t been to every town in the state either.
The main one in my town now is mixed use. It’s essentially in a mini-strip mall with a Little Caesar’s, a liquor store, an Indian restaurant and a gaming cafe. That actually makes it sound scuzzier than it is. It’s actually a newer building and the post office looks nice, but they downsized from a larger stand-alone location I presume to save money.
I once lived in a small town where the postmaster lived in the same little building as the post office. He knew I was waiting for an important letter and called me at work to let me know it had arrived. When I told him I wouldn’t be home that night before he closed, he convinced me that it was cool to ring his bell and he’d give me the envelope.
It wasn’t until after I’d moved away that, while telling the story, I realized there was no way for him to know my work phone number or even where I worked or what I did for a living. At that point the whole thing changed from a nice, sweet story to a creepy tale.
Yeah, not that creepy. I’m from a small town. When I was growing up I knew where everyone worked. Not that it happened, but if I thought they needed to know something important, it would have taken me five minutes to look them up.
“Oh, here’s something that Don might want. I know that he works for the Forest Service.” “Hello, Forest Service? Can you put me through to Don? Thanks.”
That’s pretty much the extent of it. Even if he didn’t know where you worked, he could just ask the next person that walked into the post office. Our post office was actually one of the gathering places, so there were always five or six retired old men hanging around shooting the breeze and exchanging the gossip. That’s how small towns work. Everyone knows everything about everyone else. You either find it charming or stifling.
Yeah, no, Our little post office( really not local, to me,as in 30 miles away) the postmaster is the biggest gossip in town. If you need to know something she’s the one to call. She lives next door to the P.O. I live in the a very rural area. My street mailbox is more than a mile from my house. So nothing significant is ever left in the box, I get memos and notes for pkgs or what appears to be checks or banking papers. My delivery person makes the call whether to leave it or not. Even UPS leaves me note to come pick up at their distribution center (50 miles from me). But yea in rural areas the US postal system is sometimes haphazard and unconventional.
Here in Minneapolis, there are lots of buildings with a commercial or office space on the ground floor, and apartments above that. Sometimes the owner lives upstairs, sometimes the downstairs business owns the building and rents out the upstairs apartment, and sometimes both are renting from the property owner.
It’s a good arrangement for everybody. The business gets occupants who are there overnight and watching over the space, while the occupants get a living space that is convenient and often cheaper. And the city likes it because they get more residents and more density within the city
It’s not a post office, but in a little town not far from where I live, the “courthouse” is literally the back room of a gas station (google “bonneauville pa courthouse” if you don’t believe me).
I was in Bastrop, Texas visiting my Sister. It was some ‘festival’ that weekend, so we went to it. We walked around the little ‘olde’ town part. There were a few doors with signs on them saying ‘this is a private residence, please don’t ring bell’. They were doors at street level to upstairs apartments. I thought it quite unusual. It’s a thing out there I guess. I wondered who would live in that kind of place.