9th Circuit Denies Plea From City, Tenants For Mailboxes In SROs

An effort by tenants' rights advocates and City Attorney Dennis Herrera to get individual postal delivery mandated by law at Tenderloin SROs has been rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Basically the court sympathizes with the struggling U.S. Postal Service which says that making such a change would be financially impossible.

We discussed the plea by Herrera and others last month, and it came about because of complaints from longtime tenants of single-room-occupancy hotels in the city's poorest neighborhoods. Basically, most of them have to collect mail from a central point, like a desk clerk, and it often leads to important pieces of mail, like Social Security checks, going missing.

Lawyers for the USPS argued that using central delivery points made sense because residents of SROs tend to be more transient than those in traditional apartment housing. They also argued that instituting individual delivery nationwide would cost the postal service an "onerous, unsustainable" $300 million per year, which they can hardly afford.

The 9th Circuit's decision affirms an earlier decision by a federal judge in 2011, and this case is likely to die here.

[BCN/Appeal]
[Chron]