Change of postal address - how precise does it have to be?

Factual Questions
1

My street address was recently changed by the county when they updated their EMS system. So I had to do a change of address form with the Post Office, but now I find I’m running into problems changing it with certain other entities.

I have a street and a unit number in my new address that looks like this:

Llama Llogophile
324 Main Street Unit 502
Farmpasture, IN 50012

They told me at the Post Office to write it exactly that way. No hyphen, no # symbol. But when I try to update my address with various companies and government offices it frequently throws an error saying it can’t be validated.

I am receiving mail, but here’s the weird part - when I put in a forwarding request I got a confirmation back with a DIFFERENT version of the same address. It has a hyphen. How am I to know what’s really correct? The people at the Post Office just shrug and have no idea.

Anyone else run into this sort of thing?

2

Is the hyphen in the address the USPS provided in the ZIP+4?

3

Where is the hyphen?

Anyway, I think I have the opposite situation. My address is normally written with a hyphen . Say it’s 12-34 51 St . If you use the USPS Zip Code look up it gives you this 1234 51ST ST. Same thing when I order online - apparently , some websites change whatever you enter to the post office standardized address. Doesn’t matter though- hyphen or not , the double ST or not , the two diffenent “cities” that might appear ( at a former address it’s three ) , they all get to me.

Are you asking people at the PO ? maybe you should see what the Zip Code look up says.

4

In my case, the zip code isn’t the problem. Interestingly, the people at the Post Office didn’t even know the extended zip code for my town.

My problem seems to be writing “Unit 502” or “#502” and nobody can seem to tell me.

The other frustration was using my the PO Informed Delivery web site. When I did my forwarding to the new address it turns out that does NOT also mean a change of address. That’s an entirely different process.

The local Board of Elections however, is on it. They immediately verified my new address.

5

USPS has an online address correction system that “enforces” what they think of as proper addressing. Lots of websites subscribe to that service. So whatever you type into the boxes, they send that to USPS, get a “correction” back, and show you the difference. Some websites let you override the USPS answer, some do not. Some are so badly designed they don’t show you the USPS answer and instead invite you to guess again at what will pass USPS muster.

And further, I bet there are some websites that don’t do this online, but rather have a downloaded USPS database they only refresh every X weeks or months. So they may be validating your address against stale data.

AFAIK, there isn’t a feature on the USPS website you can use to directly access that address correction database. The best I have found that you can do is to put your street address, city, and state without the unit number or zip code into ZIP Code™ Lookup | USPS and see what comes back. It’ll probably be a list of choices but from the pattern of responses you’ll be able to figure out what their idea of your correct unit number format should be. Likewise what your zip+4 is.

IME they are standardizing on “123 Mainstreet Apt [whatever numbers and/or letters, but no punctuation]” as the first line of any address representing one residential unit among many at a particular street address. Buildings coded as commercial seem to use “456 Mainstreet #[whatever…]” instead. My own apartment number has the format “AB-12” on all paperwork from my building, but USPS insists it’s properly written “Apt AB12” w no punctuation.

I do not know whether USPS’s standardization project is complete. If I had to bet, I’d bet it’s more complete in urban areas and less so out in the sticks. You may be a victim now of trying to update your address at various websites before the change has propagated all the way through USPS, much less any commercial address verification vendors who resell USPS data.

6

I used to DO this sort of thing. Change addresses/street names. Our county did not get mail delivered so that made it easier, but we still ran into all kinds of weird problems.

Changing someones address is not well received.

What we did was send change of address letters to the public, and then email about a dozen different agencies. Someone may have dropped the ball, or it’s just taking its sweet time to propagate through all the different systems.

I would look on your county’s web site to see what they show. Look at the assessor and also GIS. Those departments should be tightly intergrated, but everyone has their own ways of doing this.

Also look on GOOGLE maps.

Good Luck.

7

Our fair city has limped into the GIS era, AND digitized the paper tax assessor’s plats to share online. The tax maps show a dead end paper street running well into the footprint of my house. The GIS uses an aerial photo overlay to show that is actually my driveway next to the house. Google Maps show it as an actual street running through the block, and a couple times a year we have to help folks back out into traffic when they get balked on their turn-by-turn directions by my rosebushes.

8

That’s because a lot of people

As best as I can tell from the very confusing website (without actually filling out forms) , change of address refers to the request and forwarding refers to the service. Whether you request a permanent change of address or a temporary one , the only real difference is how long the fowarding lasts. A permanent one might also include notifying certain senders of the new address Either way it’s a change of address - i’m not sure what you are referring to when you make a distinction between “fowarding” and “change of address”.

9

You call them assessor plats. I think you may be talking about assessor maps. Maps and plats are different. But we may be just using different terms.

It doesn’t sound seamless. And aerial photo overlays with plats will often be different. Two different technologies. You can’t really do an overlay and say ‘His shed is on my property’. It’s a good start, but at least in my county we did not claim sub-meter accuracies.

We digitized the acual surveyors plat that is recorded in the clerks office. It’s a legal document. Of course because surveyors aren’t perfect and many might use a different point of beginning (what the subdivision is tied to), GIS has to sometimes fudge a little bit to get the puzzle to fit together to create a seamless countywide system.

10

I agree the terminology is fluid, even if the ground is solid. But here in Providence, the Tax Assessor publishes tax maps as a series of ‘plats’. The original survey maps from the 1860’s and earlier have been digitized, but only after being salvaged from a storeroom with a leaking ceiling and are somewhat arcanely indexed on a separate archive site…
I have worked with local surveyors to recover some of the original stone bounds set back then, and gotten arrested trying to stop one from being destroyed during a ‘sidewalk to nowhere’ replacement.
Recently, the city has promoted a GIS feature called “Where’s My Parcel and What’s My Zone” that uses a slightly orthogonal aerial photo with assessor’s [NOT surveyor’s] lot boundaries overlay to confound real estate agents, prospective buyers, and hapless existing neighbors. There are disclaimers as to legal status, accuracy, etc.etc. but they are well hidden, and most users don’t want to dig that deep.

11

Exactly.

I want to address this from the non-authoritative side of things too: the million random small-business websites that each do their own address validation system.

In the web/ecommerce world, there isn’t necessarily one standard system for submitting and validating addresses (not even the USPS one, e.g. CASS™ | PostalPro, is really all that standard, in my experience). Each website will use their own address provider service (could be a USPS service, a Google one, Smarty.com, Amazon, Stripe, or many others, or some half-assed thing they invented in-house), each with different rules and update cadences.

These systems are often outdated and failure-prone and will sometime takes months or years (if ever) to catch up with “official” address changes. What usually matters is just getting your information entered in a way that’s ultimately visible on the parcel, even if you have to cheat the system (e.g., if it won’t let you type it in Address Line 1, put it in Address Line 2, or use the name field). You often know better than these systems do, especially for anything even slightly unusual (like a 0.5 unit, recent subdivision, unlabeled “front of house” divisions, general delivery, military, non-state territories, etc.)… don’t let the stupid computer be the final word. As long as the courier can see it somewhere, they can usually figure it out even if the dumb computer doesn’t.

It’s not just smaller companies, either… Google Maps and Lyft will often be months and months behind official changes too, especially in smaller rural towns whose councils/governments might not know how to “officially” connect with the right team in those giant companies to provide timely updates. (We just recently went through this in my town, where Google Maps was leading people down a removed road and causing very dangerous u-turns, but user-submitted changes could not be validated, and when I tried to go through the “official” channels providing GIS maps, etc., they told me only the city could do that… but of course the city didn’t, so we got stuck in a half-year catch-22 with confused traffic the whole time.)

As a rule, these systems tend to suck. They usually exist to make some database administrator’s job easier, not to make your life as a homeowner or mail recipient more reliable…

12

Side anecdote: I once did some forestry/trailwork, which required me to live on US National Forest land for a few months. The work was inside designated wilderness areas with no cell service. That meant I could cancel my cell phone contract with Verizon as long as I could prove the new address wasn’t in their service area (which was easy enough to validate on their online draggable coverage map).

Problem was, there are no actual addresses or even ZIP codes out there. No roads or cars were allowed there, it being designated wilderness. Nobody delivers out there except a few backcountry packers and their mules. It’s all mapped, but using the old township & range system and not anything resembling a USPS-compatible address.

Of course the Verizon system wouldn’t accept that, or long-lat coordinates, or even a generic “Soandso National Forest”. The frontline support agent had no idea how to deal with that, and insisted they needed an address. He fought me for fifteen minutes and insisted that every place has to have an address (the man apparently had never set foot in the woods before). I asked him where he thought addresses came from, how some random piece of land would get one before it’s inhabited and developed. He thought about it for a bit, had no answer, and eventually pulled up the address of the visitor’s center, which did have cell service :roll_eyes: I told him, yes, that’s nice, but I’m living several days’ hike away from the visitor’s center… was Verizon going to deliver my voicemails by carrier pigeon?

After much argument he eventually escalated me to his manager, who was more reasonable, but still confounded by their very limited address entry system. There was no way to override it, apparently. They escalated it to their manager, who eventually acquiesced only after I provided an official letter on government letterhead saying “yes, this employee will be working somewhere with no address and no cell service”. That finally led to them manually overriding the system some other way, I guess, and setting my final address to some PO box… sigh.

13

Looks to me that it has a disclaimer splash on the default page.

I hear ya there. Our county is covered in mining claims from the 1800’s. Many overlap each other. We still have a road called ‘Bearing Tree Rd’. That’s the tree that surveyors would take bearings off of. It’s long gone now.

I hear ya. Me and another guy developed our system. Along with a company that does this stuff. I designed the database. I checked the accuracy. We did lots of work to fix things due to human input failure This was 33 years ago, so we got ahead of the curve pretty quickly.

It’s never gonna be perfect. Data lag is a big problem. But I had a ‘rule’ - “Do not let it get worse” It worked, when I left we where at 99.8% accurate for data and GIS links. Once you get down to .2% failure, it’s pretty easy to track that down. We automated a report to tell us where the failures where.

I can’t speak for Google maps or Lyft, but our data was tight.

14

I don’t think anyone keeps bad data around out of sheer malice (or even incompetence), but it’s just a hard problem to begin with… your system might be 99.8% accurate, but with 133 million US households, that’s still a couple hundred thousand mistakes. And another system might also be 99.8% accurate, but not the same 99.8%, and not necessarily over the same time period. Combine enough different datasets over different regions/countries/time periods and the errors will accumulate, often in ways that no automated system or even careful geo-historian can easily resolve.

It’s quite a miracle anything gets delivered at all… perhaps the motto should become “Neither snow nor rain nor poor data normalization stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” :laughing:

15

I’m just talking about the county I worked for. About 28000 addresses.

16

Ah, got it. Still, that is a very impressive accuracy rate.

17

Thanks. What I’m talking about is the accuracy between the gis data (it’s all just spatial polygons) and the assessor information where address info was kept. Along with owner, value and all of that.

There is a 13 digit number that had to match in both systems to link the data and individual parcels together. Consider it a sort of live join.

If the assessor and GIS where not in sync, that link would break or not exist. It was often just a timing issue and the assessor had not caught up with GIS. And there is always going to be the fat finger issue.

We are quite proud of our system. Won a statewide award.

18

By far the main reason outfits don’t attain 99.8% is cost. The people who control the budget don’t care enough to fund that level of quality. They may not even understand there is such a thing as quality.

This is true whether we’re talking GIS & addresses, or payroll, or inventory control or …

19

What did you do to increase the match rate?

20

We had hired a vender to create our GIS parcels. They had the link numbers to attach to the parcels. GIS is just data, so that was stuck in a field. We got the parcels back, and compared it to the assessor data. Also a DB with a field of the same name that is in GIS. So we looked things that did not link. GIS is very good at spatial analysis. That’s really what it’s for.

So, we found them, and worked on them. Sometimes it was a GIS issue, sometimes an assessor issue. At first I worked very hard to fix the mis-matched data. Now, we just run reports and that locates it quickly. But again, it can be a timing issue. Meaning either the assessor hasn’t worked the plat, or GIS has not yet created the parcels.

So the numbers where great. As long as it doesn’t get worse, we didn’t really have to worry about it.

Once we got damn near perfect, we just look at the reports and work it as we have time.

We have a very close working relationship to the assessor dept, heck my wife worked for them. They would do anything we asked.

I keep saying ‘we’. I retied 2 months ago.