[defrost]

I skimmed and I think that's missing

That a building|property will have only one address.

Sometimes (eg: rural Australia) property addresses are updated from an older numbered lot based system (that goes astray when properties are subdivided and infill houses appear) to a system that numbers houses by driveway distance from last major intersection.

For five or ten years a house can be recieving mail or be on the records with both the old and the new address.

[layman51]

I think this idea that a building/property can have more than one address can happen in the United States too. The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1]

So as an example, if you use the UPSP Cities by ZIP Code to research 77005 and you would see that they recommend using the city name of “Houston” for mail, but they would also recognize “West University Place”. There’s also a city called “Southside Place” which should be avoided when it comes to sending mail. But then that kind of makes me think that if a house is within the limits of one or these small cities, then it could in theory have the same street name but have two different city values in different databases.

Then on the other hand there’s a somewhat related problem where a small town or village (e.g. Somers, WI and Scotland, CT) can have multiple ZIP codes and that ends up causing a lot of headaches for the residents of the town since they all might live nearby but then each section of the town might end up associated with some other larger city it’s closest to.

[1]: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?citybyzipcode

[brianpan]

I know of a house near Chicago that has two addresses with different street names. It's on the corner of an intersection and the "mailing address" is different than the "front door" address.

Not that there's a mailbox on the mailing address street. (There's only a small side profile of a house/yard on the mailing address street side). There doesn't seem to be a good reason for the mailing address.

[duped]

> The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1]

This one affects me personally and it bugs me programmers think that they know better than I do about my address when I try and enter the city name and zip code, then they "correct" the city name based on the zip code and make it read only.

a) what was the point of me entering the city if you were going to fill it in anyway ?

b) this has happened in the last two cities I've lived and is dirt common around a major metro area in the United States. Stop autocorrecting user entered data, let them be wrong!

[nightfly]

Also: I live on sevenmile hill Rd. Google thinks it's 7 mile hill Rd, and others sometimes call it seven mile hill rd

[Dylan16807]

You can pick from multiple city names on tons of addresses. But that's a lot less exciting than having multiple completely separate numbers or streets for the same building.

[layman51]

I suppose it is, but to me it came as a bit of a surprise that if I want to send mail to someone in a certain area, I can essentially toss a coin when trying to figure out which city name to use as long as I don’t use certain ones that are discouraged names. I believe my ZIP code has two city names I could use, but I would never use the non-main one because in my mind, that other city is miles away.

That struck me, although I already knew that a ZIP code could span multiple cities and sometimes even states. I just thought there would be no confusion about which city name to use.

[pests]

I’m almost positive you can omit city name completely and just include a street address and zip code.

[devmor]

This happens in metro areas quite frequently. I used to live in a suburb of Atlanta that had a valid address in "Atlanta, GA" and "Suburb, GA" - which was a common annoyance when using delivery apps or service area locating systems as which address was considered "valid" often changed depending on the provider of their mapping API.

[bobthepanda]

There’s also the question of unit numbers and whatnot. In some addressing lookup systems in the US my address is 525 Some Road Unit G; but I have encountered systems that treat it as 525G Some Road.

[koakuma-chan]

The unit is usually formatted as either `{building number}-{unit number} {street name}` or `{building number} {street name}, Unit {unit number}`. But both resolve to the same thing.

[BobaFloutist]

What I like is that address box 2 (sometimes unlabelled, lives under the address box) exists specifically for unit numbers. So, I'll put in my street address in two lines:

  Street Address  :792 Charleston Avenue
  Street Address 2:555

At which point, almost invariably, it'll say "Do you want to accept the Post Office's recommended address?"

  Street Address  :792 Charleston Avenue 555
  Street Address 2:

Why provide the second address box if even in the one case where it's relevant and appropriate to use it, you're going to just stick the unit number in the first line anyway? It's so silly!

[FireBeyond]

Then you have vanity addresses, when I worked for a utility. Where people might put their address as, say, Beverly Hills 90212.

[makeitdouble]

It also happens in places where a house/building spans two streets, and gets an address on both. Same reason some buildings get multiple numbers on the same street (happens a lot if they want to keep the option to later split entrances and give them numbers for instance)

[MBCook]

Or they were multiple adjacent spaces in, say, a strip mall that later merged into one larger business.

[Fogest]

I used to be a EMS call taker/dispatch (911) in Ontario, Canada. Addresses could be such a pain, especially in the the more rural areas. There were multiple townships around some bigger cities. They had different naming schemes and suffered from a similar problem that you mentioned. Many of the addresses also had old addresses. Our system would luckily often have both versions of the address stored, but not always. Additionally a lot of our roads have both numbers to address them by, such as "Regional Road 12", but then they'd also have an actual name. Almost every went by the actual name, however in the rural areas sometimes they had old real names, but it never was "official" so it isn't even listed.

Overall addresses are such a mess, and they are a mess even for governmental agencies like this one.

[jbl0ndie]

In the UK, our national mapping service has built a tool for hosting vernacular place names to help first responders.

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/news/new-national-vernacula...

[Fogest]

That's neat, thanks for sharing! We had the ability to accept a what3word location however it was a really convoluted process to actually attempt to use it. Unfortunately I never personally had anyone use it to give a location, even though it probably would have helped in many cases.

Had some calls where people would be hurt in a forest on a trail system and it was pretty common for people to not even know the name of the trail they are on nor which street they entered it from. Sometimes the GPS location the phone provided to EMS would help, but it also wasn't always 100% reliable, especially if they were in a forest. So being able to have them look at a map on their phone, pin where they are, and give a what3word location would have been immensely helpful.

The kind of system you linked to would also have been quite helpful for the other problems I mentioned.

[plorkyeran]

I don’t know how they came to be, but in rural America I have seen houses which have signs very explicitly saying that two or more addresses are all this one house, so please deliver anything addressed to any of them.

[bigstrat2003]

The building in that example does have only one address. The old address is not valid any more. People just accept the erroneous use of the old address for the sake of expediency.

[defrost]

It has at least two official addresses each with a [time frame] of official validity.

When merging records the old address, no longer valid with the local land management agency, still appears on old notices and on current state and or federal records (as land naming agencies are layered in some locales with changes taking time to perculate).

The old address is "the correct address" in the context of birth records, old newspaper articles, last years tax records, etc.

You're technically pedantically correct .. but in a manner that's moot when faced with the realities of day to day day reconciliation of meaning of text on an envelope or document.

[tangus]

Besides that, in Buenos Aires, for instance, every access to the street has its own address. A building with 2 entrances (front door and garage) has 2 addresses, etc.