One household has filled most of our building’s bike room. How do we discuss space without counting every wheel?

Our building’s bike room has twelve wall hooks and space for perhaps four more bicycles on the floor.

One household now stores seven bikes there.

Two are adult commuter bikes, two appear to belong to children, one is a cargo bike and two have flat tires and dust on the seats. The family lives on the third floor, so I understand why carrying bicycles upstairs is difficult. I also understand why the rest of us are frustrated.

When I moved in, I could hang my bike on an open hook. Over the summer, the hooks filled. Then bikes began leaning in front of them. I now have to move a child’s bike and angle mine around the cargo bike every morning. Another resident keeps hers in her apartment because she cannot reliably reach a hook.

There is no posted allocation. The lease mentions shared bicycle storage but does not assign spaces per unit. That ambiguity has allowed everyone to tell a different fairness story. The large household sees seven riders using seven bikes. A single resident sees one apartment consuming nearly half the room.

The dusty bikes have become the focus of the group chat. People want management to tag anything that looks unused and remove it after a deadline. I support a general cleanup, but I do not want “dusty” to become a test that only this family is expected to pass. My own bike can look abandoned after two rainy weeks.

I would prefer a system: one guaranteed hook per unit, additional spaces available when capacity remains, and a separate conversation about oversized bikes or long-term storage. That sounds tidy on paper and may not fit the actual room.

The family has not been rude. When I asked them to leave a path, they moved two bikes against the wall. Within days, the path narrowed again because there is simply too much equipment for the layout.

Would you approach the family directly, ask management to create a building-wide allocation, or organize a resident meeting first? How do we acknowledge that a larger household may reasonably own more bikes without letting the shared room become first-come, permanently occupied storage?