A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld the U.S. Postal Service’s decision nearly five years ago to deliver mail to the front desk or a central collection box rather than to individual mailboxes at most of San Francisco’s 500 single-room-occupancy hotels.

About 30,000 San Franciscans live in SROs, buildings containing small, low-rent units with communal bathrooms and kitchens.

Before 2006, nearly all of them had a single drop-off point for mail, at the front desk or in a collection box. In response to complaints of lost or stolen mail, including government checks, city supervisors passed an ordinance in 2006 requiring the building owners to install individual mailboxes and to make arrangements with the Postal Service for delivery.

The Postal Service cooperated and was delivering mail to postboxes in about one-third of the SROs before its national office intervened in December 2008 and halted further expansion of the service.

via Postal Service wins appeal on S.F. SRO deliveries

 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California
Richard Seeborg, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted November 5, 2013
San Francisco, California
Before: FARRIS, FERNANDEZ, and IKUTA, Circuit Judges.

The City and County of San Francisco, Central City SRO Collaborative, San Francisco Tenants Union, and Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco1 appeal the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the United States Postal Service (USPS) on their claims that the USPS’s use of single-point delivery of mail violated the right of tenants of single room occupancy (SRO) hotels to equal protection under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution and their right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. We affirm.

(1) The City first asserts that USPS violated SRO hotel tenants’ equal protection rights when it delivered their mail using single-point delivery rather than centralized delivery. The former is the method generally used for hotels, and the latter is generally used for apartment houses and single family houses. The City asserts that the failure to treat SRO hotel tenants the same as apartment house tenants violates the formers’ right to equal protection. We disagree. Equal protection requires that “all persons similarly situated should be treated alike. That said, as the parties agree, rational basis review applies in this case, which means that the distinction made here “is presumed to be valid and will be sustained if the classification drawn . . . is rationally related to a legitimate [government] interest.” That standard is satisfied if there is “any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the classification.” We agree with the district court that on this record it was rational for the USPS to draw a distinction between SRO hotels and apartment houses based upon the very design of the former as entities which, like regular hotels, allow for much more transience. The USPS could rationally predict that if SROs were treated like apartment houses, the effect would be detrimental to the efficiency and economics of postal operations. The economic character of the effect does not doom it as irrational. Rather, USPS’s use of single-point delivery service “is a rational response to the inefficiencies and increased costs that would result from” use of centralized delivery service for SRO hotels. That distinction did not become irrational because the USPS “grandfathered” and thus continued centralized delivery service to the SRO hotels that had (contrary to USPS policies) been receiving that service for over 90 days. That ameliorative approach was in accord with USPS policies,2 took account of reliance interests,3 and while it made the basic decision more incremental, government is not limited to all or nothing solutions.4 Moreover, while the City points to some factual disputes, we agree with the district court that none of those are sufficient to undermine or affect the rational basis of the USPS’s classification of SROs. In short, the district court properly determined that the record would not support a determination that the USPS had violated the SRO hotel tenants’ equal protection rights.

(2) The City next asserts that the USPS violated the SRO hotel tenants’ free speech rights when it declared that it would use the single-point delivery service approach. Again, we disagree. Again, our decision in Currier, is instructive; it sets out the relevant test. We agree with the district court that the forum at issue here is centralized delivery, which is the portion of the mail delivery system to which access is sought, as opposed to the mail delivery system as a whole. That, as the district court and the parties agree, is a nonpublic forum. There is no claim that any restrictions imposed by USPS’s use of single-point delivery are not both content neutral and viewpoint neutral. Moreover, the limitations are otherwise reasonable for essentially the same reasons that they are rational. In fine, the USPS did not violate the First Amendment rights of the SRO hotel tenants.