For three decades, United Parcel Service (UPS) has operated a two-tiered system on Staten Island. If you live in a majority-White apartment complex, your packages arrive at your building. If you live in Park Hill or Fox Hill Apartments, where only 1% of residents are White, you are subjected to what a new class-action lawsuit calls the “Non-Delivery Policy”. This isn’t an accident. It is a corporate policy with a clear, discriminatory impact, enforced daily on thousands of Black and Hispanic residents.

The lawsuit, led by plaintiff Gordon Flowers, a resident with disabilities, lays the facts bare. While competitors like FedEx, DHL, and Amazon manage to deliver packages directly to the eleven buildings in these complexes, UPS refuses. Instead, it forces over 1,400 households to a single outdoor location at a set time, creating an ongoing, systemic barrier to essential goods for an entire community.

The Non-Financial Ledger

This is not a story about inconvenient shipping. This is a story about the corporate theft of time, dignity, and safety. Imagine being elderly or, like plaintiff Gordon Flowers, using a walker to get around. Now imagine having to travel up to a third of a mile, not to a store, but just to retrieve a package you already paid to have delivered to your home. This journey is often just the beginning.

Residents must wait outdoors for the UPS truck, exposed to New York’s brutal summer heat, freezing winters, rain, and snow. The truck may be late. It may come early. A missed window means your essential medication or household goods are rerouted to a facility a 25-minute drive or a 70-minute bus ride away. This policy imposes a physical and logistical tax on people of color, a daily reminder from a multi-billion dollar corporation that their time and well-being are worthless.

Societal Impact Mapping

The Architecture of Discrimination

The numbers from the 2020 census data are not subtle. They are a verdict. In the Park Hill and Fox Hill complexes, 99% of residents are people of color. This is not a coincidence; it is the entire basis of the policy. UPS provides standard service to other, similar-sized apartment buildings on Staten Island which are majority White. The segregation of service is a modern-day redlining, drawn not by banks, but by a logistics giant.

Legal Receipts

The class action complaint is not based on feelings. It is based on a clear pattern of disparate treatment prohibited by law. The corporation’s actions are a direct violation of civil rights statutes designed to prevent exactly this kind of discrimination.

“UPS’s Non-Delivery Policy discriminates against and adversely impacts the residents of Park Hill and Fox Hill, the vast majority of whom are non-White, by refusing to provide these residents the basic services that the residents of other similarly situated apartment buildings enjoy—services for which these residents have paid.”

Class Action Complaint, Paragraph 5

“What makes Park Hill and Fox Hill different? Many similar apartment buildings on Staten Island—where UPS offers its standard service—are majority White. But at the two apartment complexes where UPS does not deliver to the residents, Fox Hill and Park Hill, only 1% of the residents are White.”

Class Action Complaint, Paragraph 4

What Now?

This fight is not just in the courtroom. Corporate boards respond to sustained public pressure. The system that allowed this policy to exist for 30 years must be held accountable from the top down and the bottom up.

Corporate Leadership Watchlist:

• Chief Executive Officer, United Parcel Service, Inc.
• Board of Directors, United Parcel Service, Inc.
• Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer, United Parcel Service, Inc.

Regulatory & Legal Watchlist:

• New York State Civil Rights Law (NYCRL)
• New York City Human Rights Law (NYCHRL)
• U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York

Direct action begins locally. Support tenants organizing in the Park Hill and Fox Hill apartments. Find and amplify their voices. Contribute to mutual aid networks in Staten Island that are already filling the gaps left by corporate negligence. This is not UPS’s story to control; it belongs to the people they have wronged.