Suppose I live at 4621 Elm St., and the next house down is 4629. If I notified all the authorities and utilities concerned, could I somehow make my property 4625? Obviously it’s a question of local jurisdictions–I suppose in most places the county recorder or something-- but does this ever occur? And barring an “official” means of accomplishing my goal, what if I simply took a screwdriver and replaced the 1 with a 5? Would the mail carrier drop off mail bearing the new address? Would he or she continue to deliver mail bearing the old address? Would the property tax rate change? Could a search warrant for my “old” address be staved off?
After all, if I can get a vanity license plate for my car, why not a vanity address? (666 Diablo Dr.?)
I don’t have a factual answer to the question but will give my thoughts.
I considered doing this when I bought my first house. The address was 1312 xxxx and I grew up on 1314 xxxx. I thought it would be easier for me and family members to remember if they were the same. I considered just using the 1314 in all of my change of address forms etc.
It certainly wouldn’t be official in any way, but I don’t think that the postman would care at all.
Anyway, it was such a hectic time I kinda forgot about my plan and didn’t want to go through the address change hassle a second time.
Just for kicks I went to the USPS website and used the Zipcode lookup feature for an address on my street that does not exist and got:
May be returned. I would guess that in the process of sorting the mail, your mail carrier would see the non-existent address and return it. If he recognized your name he might put it in your box.
This is pretty much it. I used to carry mail while on break from college, and very quickly (within about two months) I knew pretty much every resident in town adress (about 25000 population) and could identify improperly addressed items on sight. If I knew that Joe Schmoe lives at XXX This St, but saw mail addressed to XYZ That St., I’d just bring it to the right address (the following day, if I’d already passed that address on my route). If you’re in a large apartment building or an urban area, though, you might be out of luck.
Or it exists and is not in their database. A new address for instance.
My department for county government is responsible for assigning physical addresses. And oddly, we do NOT get mail deliverery here. Most mailing addresses are PO boxes.
As we also have many second/vacation homeowners, a lot of tax notices and such go out of state to the owner. It’s not odd at all for someone to call us and change their mailing address. No biggie.
As far as your physical address is concerned, that’s a lot tougher. Though if the county has reason to change it we will.
If you change it to something that does not fit the scheme of things, we won’t acknowledge the change. If you have good reason to request a change, we will certainly look into it. And then we notify all the different agencies.
Don’t know about other areas, but in small town Missouri, addresses are assigned by the EMS 911 Dispatch Center. When we bought our property I contacted the local Post Office for an address and was quickly rerouted to the 911 folks.
My parents did this with a couple of different houses. I know the last one, which was on a corner lot, they had a choice of which street they wanted to use as the address, and a choice of several numbers for each street.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how you’d go about it. I’d start with the city offices and find out who assigns the addresses, then go from there.
i’ve seen address ranges assigned to physical locations. every segment of street has a range of numbers that have to occur there with numbers needing to be available for the number of lots. also there are odd/even sides.
So if I try to make it a number out of sequence with the physical layout of the house, no go? And by “we won’t acknowledge the change,” what exactly does that mean? Who cares if you do or don’t acknowledge it?
Again, this seems subjective. I can see how changing an address could be problematic on records for property assessment, etc… Some person in the future might become confused going over the files, and probably people who do that aren’t going to be expecting an address change. It’s not something that happens with the frequency that name changes happen.
ALL? If my license says I live at 4126, and the cops want to seize or search my files or something, will they they be able to know that when they ask for a search warrant, to have it include a range of addresses, or something like that? What happens when someone points out to them when they arrive that they have the “wrong” address?
Part of my interest in this is about the purely practical, but I’m also curious about where the social authority to name things comes from–and an address is, after all, nothing more than a name.
I saw a house in metro Detroit that apparently was divided into 2 addresses by someone who didn’t understand the odd/even rule, as it became something like 16325 and 16326. I wonder if the homeowner did that themselves, then.
10 years ago they changed the street name itself of my office (the only one on the street) from L’Avenida to La Avenida, apparently because the apostrophe in L’Avenida was causing problems with address databases.
Yahoo! Maps would frequently revert the name back to L’Avenida after a map update, presumably due to some intersecting databases not updating somewhere, which would cause other agencies who tied into it to return errors along the lines of “La Avenida does not exist - please recheck the address blah blah.”
Very annoying, but it’s all been ironed out since then.
My understanding is that vanity addresses occur more than you think. An old apartment building a friend of mine lived in bore the address 2005 [Street Name], the same year as the building was constructed. I think this was only allowed because the neighboring building numbers were something like 2001 and 2009, the developer could choose any number between those two numbers (and must be odd since they were on the particular side of the street). Also, a local college is the only property on a particular stretch of road, and so has the number 12345 [Other Street Name].
There’s a lot of decision leeway when a parcel is subdivided or a new large building is initially put up. There is a lot less after the names and addresses are out there.
Lots of agencies have a practical interest in addresses being constant over time. And as our resident expert said above, the county decides whether they like the address your developer proposed. If so, it’s mostly locked in UFN.
Very few parcels in the US are ex nihilo. Darn near everything is a subdivision of something existing and needs to fit within the flex of the existing naming / numbering system.
House numbers at one time were based on how many houses there were starting with 1 and going up. If a new hous was added between 50 and 51 it became 50B. Every so many years they would renumber the houses. My dad’s birth certificate gave his birth place as Box 76 route 4 and city. Mine reads Box 131 Route, city. It was the same house.
To eliminate the continued changes of numbers the method was changed. First the numbers started at the begining of a road or street and increased by 1 every so many feet. Even on one side odd the other. This was improved with the numbers begining at the center of town or the post office using the two main cross streets. Our street is two blocks long. And because our house is so many feet away from the main road the number is 692.
Some areas the numbers will increase every foot other areas every 10 feet and some every 100 feet. the city sets this.
The US Postal Service is not the issue. The E911 system is.
Your telephone number and name are linked to a physical address in the system. If you dial 911, or someone else calls 911 to report that there’s a problem at your home, the EMS people use that address to find your house. Changing your address on the mailbox or the front of the house with a screwdriver won’t just delay your UPS shipment, it could cost you your life as the emergency response teams wander in to the wrong house trying to find you.
The E911 people set the address. They update it in the county databases. The county passes that data on to the USPS. The USPS runs an address verification system used by UPS, FedEx, and half the websites on the planet.
For the rural addresses here in Montana, the number has a specific meaning: it indicates how many hundredths of a mile you are from the end of your road. If your address is 50 Dogfart Lane, the ambulance driver will know to go to Dogfart Lane, make the turn, and travel exactly 1/2 mile to get to your driveway.
They maintain the database of valid mailing addresses. Which is used by all the mass mailers, political candidates, government, etc., as well as the Post Office itself. If you just start to use a different address number than the one in that database for your house, you will not be found in the database, so mail from anybody who verifies address before mailing will reject your new address. And most first-class, like a letter from your Grandma, also gets processed against this database (to add the barcoded zip on the bottom of the envelope), so it too would get sent back to her marked “Address unknown”.
Your local postal carrier will probably recognize your name and your new address, and deliver mail to you under either the old or your new house number. But most mail is processed by the automated system before it gets to your carrier, and anything using your new unofficial house number will be rejected at that point.
To make this work, you would have to make it official, starting with your local government and the Post Office. And it may not be easy, or cheap. [ul] [li]First, they may demand a good reason to do this. [/li][li]Then the local government will have to change the deed to the property, the tax records, etc. – and they are likely to make you pay for these changes. [/li][li]The bank or mortgage company may require a new mortgage document for this ‘new’ address, and expect you to pay points for it.[/li][li]Then the Post Office will do a change of address for you, but that only lasts for a short time – for that time, the PO will ‘forward’ mail from your old house number to your new one. But once that time is up, any mail still using the old house number will be rejected and returned to the sender. [/li][li]Then there will be a probably lengthy delay while the new address percolates up to the various mapping databases (Mapquest, Google Earth, etc.). In the meantime, someone trying to look up directions to your house may be told no such house number exists. [/ul][/li]
This is not something to be done lightly!
The reasons can be many. Conflicts with another address. A change in access to the property. Road name change. Or it was just wrong to begin with. For instance, before the county took over addressing there where no rules or system for addressing. We have some real doosies out there.
Believe me. YOU care if we acknowledge it. Want 911 service? Or a new mortgage or sell your house? It’s a lot more than pizza delivery.
It’s not subjective at all. We have quite strict rules for addresses.
We notify all agencies such as 911, Utilities, the towns (if it is in a town). There are about a dozen. And of course we update our records for your property. If your drivers license has the wrong address on it, it is up to you to get it updated.
In our case, the authority comes from a resolution from the County commissioners and agreements with the towns.
For instance, we prevent developers from duplicating road names in new subdivisions. It goes through planning and then through GIS. If you want your project approved, you have to abide by certain conditions. Simple as that.
We have one town that really f’d up their addresses. They started with say 12 lots per block about 100 years ago. They addressed them not by distance or block range (1-99, 101-199) but 1-21 and 2-22. Now of course they are splitting and subdividing the lots like crazy, and they have to use letters to fit new lots in or change addresses. It’s a mess.
We use the rural mile post system. The address is based on the percentage of a mile. One mile up the road would have an address of 1000.
Yes, but if you’d kept reading my post, you’d have seen that the Postal Service maintains that database, but they don’t create the database.
You don’t go to the Post Office to say you want to change your address. You go to the county (or city or parish or whatever local government is appropriate), establish the address with them, and they pass it on to the Post Office as part of their database update.
We had an experience once where a data entry clerk at the county misspelled our street name. A couple of months later, address verification systems started rejecting our (correct) address. It took a year to get everything fixed, and in the meantime we had to misspell the name of our street on everything we ordered.