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The United States Postal Service (USPS) will not move forward with its prior commitment to re-opening an Allston branch on 25-39 Harvard Avenue, according to a statement released by Eden Properties on Friday night.

The decision was “made at a higher level within USPS and appears to reflect broader shifts, not just conditions in Allston,” stated Noah Maslan, who oversees Eden Properties, in a press release.

Some neighbors find the lack of a proximate post office to be a significant challenge presented to the Allston community. Anthony D’Isidoro, resident and Allston Civic Association president, argues that an option to go to a post office because it can prevent package theft. 

“Whenever the carrier comes by, people go around and steal that mail. […] And what they were doing was they were taking checks that they got a hold of and scrubbing the numbers to make them larger, so they were able to alter the amounts,” said D’Isidoro. “You got two options, stand at your door all day long and hope that you bump personally into your carrier [or] you can actually hand them the mail or go to a post office. 

“And yet, here they are denying the residents of Allston a reasonable and appropriate location for them to do that.”

He also noted how letter carriers for Allston must go into Downtown Boston to pick up mail to deliver due to the lack of a branch-specific postal office.

“The letter carriers in Allston […] they have to drive into Boston every morning to pick up, to pick up the mail, right? They don’t pick it up in the neighborhood. They pick it up in Downtown Boston,” said D’Isidoro. “So those poor people have to go. You think of the winter time and everything — having to get on the Mass Pike and go to the central facility to pick up the mail, which is really unfortunate.”

Allston has been without a post office since December 2019 when the former building had closed due to structural issues. D’Isidoro says that a root system of a tree from the adjacent Harvard Terrace had been going through the foundation of the building and causing a foundational defect. In a previous interview with Allstonia, Maslan also said that one of the walls inside the old post office was held up only with scaffolding.

D’Isidoro recalls a time where the community relied heavily on the post office. 

“You had a lot of people, especially students and young professionals. You had a lot of immigrants sending packages back home, or receiving packages, or, you know, getting their passports in order, and this or that,” he recollected. “But it was always, always busy.”

In 2020, USPS opened a Mobile Post Office, a truck parked in front of the former location to take mail and sell stamps. “But that went away. That went away fairly quickly,” D’Isidoro stated.   

Four years later in 2023, Maslan filed plans for Eden Properties to build a six-story, multi-use complex with 170 residential units and a USPS post office. Following this, people from USPS met once with the Boston City Council and sent postcards to local residents requesting their community input.

By June 2025, USPS had explicitly “decided to proceed with the relocation of the Post Office” in a “final decision with respect to the Postal Service’s proposal to relocate retail services from the above-referenced Post Office to a yet-to-be-determined location as close as reasonably possible to the former location,” according to a letter by Benjamin Kuo, who helps to oversee Facilities and Infrastructure at USPS.

After experiencing delays due to tariffs and high costs of construction, shovels were put to ground this past October. At the time, Allstonia reported that “USPS is currently conducting a final stage of internal review before they can officially proceed with the new location.”

Maslan claims that Eden Properties and USPS had a fully negotiated lease with construction plans in place, but in the end, the signatures fell through.

“This had been stretched out so long without a written agreement. Maybe, maybe it was all negotiated. The paperwork was all set to go. It just needed signatures. But the fact that it never got to the point of a signature, I wasn’t surprised,” said D’Isidoro, who stated that he has remained in contact with Maslan throughout the development process. “I said, ‘As long as you don’t have a signed lease, that gives them a major out.’ And wasn’t my worst fear realized?”

The USPS is currently reporting financial struggles and increasing losses. It remains unclear the exact reason why the postal service decided to reverse its commitment.