Wall Street Journal: Each morning, Diane Legault heads to an all-white space with floor-to-ceiling glass windows framing the Atlantic: the mailroom at Jade Signature, her beachfront condo building in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla.
“It has the most beautiful views,” the 57-year-old pharmaceutical consultant says of the mailroom at Jade, where she lives in a $5.4 million condo. She says she enjoys chatting with neighbors while sorting her mail at the reclaimed-wood table. “I take my time” going through the mail, she explains. “You don’t mind doing it there because it’s just such a lovely atmosphere.”
The mailroom—that spot in every building where residents grab their bills and catalogs—is in transition. On one hand, postal mail grows ever less relevant amid the digital revolution: Overall volume fell by 4.9 billion to 149,491 billion pieces in fiscal 2017, the U.S. Postal Service reported. On the other hand, changes to the thicket of Postal Service, federal and local regulations that govern mailboxes are forcing real-estate developers to upsize these traditionally pedestrian spaces. Read more.