The Allston Post Office on Harvard Avenue was originally shut down in 2019 because of structural issues with the building.

A tree was growing underneath and, eventually, inside of the building.

Since then, the United States Postal Services (USPS) has continuously waffled on whether or not the location would reopen. It was considered by proponents of the post office that the USPS might try to keep it open on paper, but keep it closed in reality, so as not to have to go through the public process to close the office. This has been such a problem that the U.S. House of Representatives recently created a bill to make sure the USPS is at least transparent about how many offices it is closing https://gvimes.link/uspssusp

Things looked good last year when the USPS and owner of the new building, Eden Properties, appeared to be in agreement to open a smaller retail post office in the same location. District 9 City Councilor Liz Breadon and many Allston residents have been campaigning hard to reopen the post office in the six years since its closure.

But last Tuesday, Breadon’s office sent out an email notifying residents that a meeting was going to be held on the following Friday, Sept. 11, at 1 p.m. Breadon followed up with The Bulletin after the meeting, and summed up her feelings on the matter in two words.

“Not happy,” she said. “That would be two words. I feel that the meeting was very unsatisfactory. I think we had a lot more questions asked in the chat that were never addressed, and it’s an unsatisfactory response to very serious concerns that we have in Allston and Brighton about how the USPS handled this closure situation.”

Sept. 11 is not a federal holiday. Many people still had work and other obligations to see to at that time, and still, the USPS moderators reported about 54 people at the virtual meeting (though it was not listed in the Zoom meeting application itself).

District Manager Carissa Shea said the meeting was the public start of the 210-day evaluation process that would permanently close the now suspended post office. According to USPS representative Rebecca Hosein – no title was given and a Google search cannot even confirm she works at the USPS – the closure evaluation process was approved in the spring and started on Sept. 4.

She said the reason for starting that process is partly procedure – the P101 guidebook dictates that the USPS will look at permanently closing an office if it is suspended for any reason. She said that was the only reason for starting the process.

“We have exercised that right to pursue the discontinuance study, due to the suspension of the facility,” she said. “There were building repairs that needed to be made that deemed it unsafe for employees and customers to stay in that location. So it isn’t that, ‘Hey we just want to close it,’ we had to leave that facility and suspend our operation.”

Later, residents pressed the USPS officials on last year’s agreement with Eden Properties for the replacement retail location.

“We have had discussions with a developer; at this point and when we had gone through our processes, [we] paused any movement until we finalize our discontinuance study,” she said.

So the reason for the study appears to be the suspension, and the reason for the breaking in the agreement with Eden appears to be the study. But the suspension happened in 2019, the agreement in 2025, and the study approval in 2026.

For those who might not remember, the USPS issued a letter of agreement with Eden last year – https://gvimes.link/uspscmtmntlttr – and reversed that decision in the spring – https://gvimes.link/allstonuspsrvrs

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When asked about increasing resources at the Brighton branch of the USPS, Hosein gave this response:

“Between me and the Postmaster of Boston (James H. Murphy) we evaluate the workload from our customer transactions, the traffic coming into our retail lobbies and also the package services and mail volume – letters and flats – that we deliver everyday,” she said. “There is a routine evaluation of what we need for our people resources for what we need to be able to service our community.”

Hosein gave a similar response when asked about how the USPS determines the need for a post office when Breadon, in the chat, asked why Allston-Brighton can have a population of 87,000 people and one post office, when Newton has a similar population (90,000 residents) but 12 post offices.

“It does vary depending on where you are in the city, state or country. We have several customer service metrics,” she said. “We have carriers, evaluated routes by delivery and time it takes, and similarly we do that for the retail: how many clerks and stations do we have, customer satisfaction surveys, wait time in line, alternate access for our customers as well such as our self-service kiosks, and let’s not forget the multitude of transactions our customers do on USPS.com, which has grown exponentially in the past decade.”

Hosein said the feasibility/ closure study will be completed in about 210 days and “would be available for the customer to review at the post office.” Which post office, and, why if the online services are experiencing “exponential” growth, the study would not be available online, was not answered.

Breadon said she felt many of the answers provided during the meeting were rhetorical runarounds.

“It’s a game,” she said. “I think they’re hiding behind procedural rules, and it’s not clear to me they’re following their own procedures. Because they did send a letter out last year, with a commitment that they were coming back. And it was written like, ‘Don’t argue with us, this is our final decision to reestablish a post office on Harvard Avenue,’ and this year they came back and completely reversed it, saying, ‘Yeah yeah, the process was incomplete.’ Well, you know, they had gone as far as working with the developer to set out specifications for what they needed for a retail post office space, and the developer committed to delivering that space for them, and they turn around a year later and walk away like nothing happened? It’s not appropriate.”

Breadon said she felt the timing of the meeting was designed to illicit fewer responses and less outcry, as many residents had to work at 1 p.m. on a Friday. She also said that seemed to be the case when the USPS put in a mobile retail unit after the post office’s first closure in 2019, barely telling anyone about it and then closing it during COVID-19, saying it didn’t generate enough business.

“It’s disingenuous to bring up the lack of demand for the mobile space,” she said. “It’s not good.”

Breadon said the USPS is not fulfilling its constitutional duty.

“They’re missing the point of who they’re supposed to serve,” she said. “It’s mandated in the U.S. Constitution that you’re supposed to have a service that’s acceptable to people, and they’re just not delivering for Allston.”