The Food Bank of the Future Could Be in a Post Office

In 2014, a white paper by the United States Postal Service’s Inspector General contemplated the future of the crumbling USPS system, toying with the idea of reinventing its declining infrastructure “to provide innovative services that would yield new revenue.” Total mail volume is down, and so is employment and revenue. Out of 30,000 USPS branches across the country, 17 percent have shuttered offices since 1971. But while you can most certainly repurpose a USPS box for extra paper storage, repurposing an entire USPS storage facility, on the other hand, is not as easy.

Last year, the city of Clearwater, Florida, debated turning its historic post office into some kind of entertainment space such as a restaurant, before the landmark building ended up on a closure list. But the latest effort to transform the USPS system comes from a group of students at Washington University, St. Louis, who propose using the existing infrastructure to serve the needs of food-insecure populations in Los Angeles.