Could you permanently live on land you own and not have an official address?

Factual Questions
1

Just a weird thought that occurred to me. Suppose some guy is an utter loner – wants no contact with other people at all. He’s got tons of money, say, inherited a hundred million dollars. He locates somebody who owns one of those huuuuge cattle ranches out in a near desert western area and buys, oh, fifty acres of it. Specifically picking an area that isn’t accessed by any road. Has no water, no minerals, no scenic interest, no endangered whatever. Just a stretch of sandy rocky land of no interest.

Then he has a modular house put in (delivered by helicopter?) and moves in. Now, of course he has no utility service, but he doesn’t care. Once a month or so he gets helicoptered in delivery of a big tank of water and canned food and clothes or whatever else he wants. Heck, he has some solar panels set up if he wants electricity. Has a satellite phone or radio or something to relay his orders to some flunky elsewhere who takes care of procuring and shipping what he needs.

Anyway. He moves in and lives there full time, happy as a clam, on his own legally owned property.

The question I wonder about is, does he have a legal address? What would he have to put down on any standard address form? (I don’t know what kind of form – maybe he gets called for jury duty.)

Obviously he’d be in some state. What about town/city? I guess the original ranch was registerd as being officially somewhere, maybe wherever the rancher’s personal house was located? Would our guy ‘inherit’ that town, even if his chunk of land was located many miles from any other residence/town building?

What about street/number? I mean, there simply isn’t a street. Could our loner arbitrarily pick a name and number? Number One Misanthrope Drive, say?

2

His actual address would probably be something like Rural Route #4, Box 32, Anytown, Anystate, Zip code or similar.

That’s how my address worked before they named the roads by our property.

3

Many rural people have a box at the post office. My grandparents had the same one for at least 40 years.

Someone can live off the grid, and eschew routine contact with civilization. The off the grid movement is quite popular right now. They occasionally buy supplies and otherwise avoid civilization.

4

I work in the GIS department for county government.

We do the addressing for the county.

I’m pretty sure that even a modular home without utilities will need some sort of building permit. Which requires an address.

We also require that residential structures are accessible by road/driveway. And there are required to be up to certain standards (no more that 8% grade [I think that’s it, not in the engineering department any longer]). This is for emergency service which the county must be able to provide.

If the ‘driveway’ is longer than 400’ we require a road name. The owner may name it, but there are certain requirements for that as well. For instance the name can’t duplicate an existing road name. Misanthrope Lane would probably be approved. If the owner does not want to name the road, it will just have a county road number.

But the house number would be much higher. In rural areas, the house number is based on distance along the road. We do have some leeway, but not much. I once changed an address because a fellow said that his numerologist did not like it. It was to be a brand new address, and his new development. There was no conflict to change it from 110 to 112.

Now this is just the county I work for. We get very limited mail service (there are a few gang boxes). Other counties vary. But, it’s pretty important with the advent of GIS and routing to have a standardized address.

In the OP’s specific scenario, though, the land owner might get away with it in a very remote area. Who would know?

5

Some government somewhere presumably has taxing authority over that land and will insist on getting paid. That would require at least an official description of the property, if not a formal address.

6

I would answer this question an unqualified yes. I would futher add you don’t need to be off grid or out in Hooterville to pull it off.

Back in 1992 I purchased some bare land. It was adjacent to a county road with neighbors on the other side with house numbers. In 1994 I procured a USPS post box for mail.

I constructed a permitted residence in 1997. No address for this residence was needed at the time. For permitting purposes my place was described as “on Xyz Street, near the intersection of highway 36, on the right side as you head south.”

In 1999 I finally applied to the County for an address. I even selected the number, within the constraints imposed by the block numbering already in place. Until then all my USPS mail went to the post office box. I didn’t have a streetside mailbox at all.

On occasion I wish I had never asked for an address.

7

I’ll just post to note that “address” and “mailing address” are two separate things, and it’s entirely possible to have the first and not the second.

That is, your house can have an address which describes where it is perfectly well, and even be on a named road, and not be in any danger whatsoever of ever having the mail delivered to that address: It’s a PO box in the nearest town or nothing, as far as the USPS is concerned. Since having an address of that variety neither breaks your leg nor picks your pocket nor delivers unto you junk mail, whether your domicile has one is a purely academic question.

And if you want to get academic about all this, I will note that everyone who owns land pays property tax, and land must be identified such that the government knows which property’s tax got paid. That identification could be seen as an address of a sort, if you squint your eyes enough.

8

I once knew a woman who lived in the desert a few miles outside Las Vegas. She just towed a small camper-type trailer into the desert … had a military surplus 250 water tank on wheels that she towed in to town once in a while to fill, used a propane refrigerator, and had a small diesel generator for electricity. She used a Mail Boxes Etc. type place for a mailing address. She asked no permission and when the property owners threw her off the land after a couple of years she just moved a few miles further out.

She is the only one I ever actually met, but there are similar looking places all over the Nevada desert.

9

This all depends on your local jurisdiction …

Typically, any plot of land will have to have access to a public road … and if the plot of land doesn’t abut a public road, an easement will be created across the neighbor’s property creating this access … say for example a 20 foot strip between the property and the road where the property owner has full rights of access and improvement … where this easement connects to the public road will have a street address that can be mathemagically calculated … and must be clearly posted on the public road …

We did this here when we consolidated our 911 service … when someone calls in an emergency, they can give a unique street address that can be very quickly located perhaps saving critical minutes of time trying to find the place … including the county government installing their own address signs if the property owners didn’t …

Mailing addresses are strictly up to the USPS … and they have several options available to them … Rural Route Boxes, Post Office Boxes, Street Address … when I was homeless I used the mailing address of General Delivery, Big Sur, CA, 93920 … every couple of weeks I’d check in and they’d give me any mail that had come for me …

10

This really depends on location. We’re in Missouri, on 25 acres. The nearest town with any real stuff in it (restaurants, gas stations, etc) is about 10 miles away, so not that remote. 1hr to Kansas city. The only building permit we needed was for the septic. Our driveway is about 800 feet and just considered a normal driveway.

I’m pretty sure if we wanted to we could plop a house down on some land out here and no one would bat an eye if we didn’t bother with an address.

11

Oh, dear. The trouble with roads is that people come down them. Could he possibly sign a waiver or something that they don’t have to send police/fire/ambulances after him? Let him die alone if he wants to live alone that badly. :slight_smile:

Hmm. Can’t he claim they were measuring from the ‘wrong’ end? But I doubt the road number will bother him, it’s not like he’ll be giving it out to a lot of friends or anything.

Dang, I forgot about property taxes.

Hmmm. Actually, that brings up one aspect I was wondering about: is every bit of land located in a town? I mean, states always butt up against the next state (or the national border), and here in New England towns seem to ‘touch’, but out in lightly populated regions, aren’t there areas that are ‘between’ towns? Maybe just considered part of a county? Otherwise you could get weird towns in deserts, like a town with a population of 100 people living in a couple of blocks that comprise a town but that town officially spreads out over 400 square miles of empty sand.

Interesting story! But isn’t she essentially covered under ‘homeless’? And thus naturally wouldn’t have an address. I was wondering if you could have a fixed, permanent, legal home and not have an address.

12

Varies by state. In Michigan, if you tried to live in a tent or a camper in the woods, you would be assigned a “fire number”, which is used by officials to quickly locate any place, primarily for the purpose of responding to a fire call. I don’t think you can opt out of it. On rural Michigan roads, you’ll see the fire number signs at the property entrance, it looks like a license plate. I think Minnesota does that too. Wisconsin has an elaborate system of coordinates within each county, and postal delivery addresses outside a city look like S78 W22391 Adams Road. Wherever you are, you have an address.

13

And if someone else is there, and wants emergency help, or to report a crime, how will they do it?

We have this sort of question once and a while here on the Straight Dope. Someone wants to block all WiFi signals in their home, or never answer their door in the middle of the day, or obstruct their own driveway, or not register their home, or … or … or … or why can’t I just buy a home without signing a document.

You can’t. Because then you could perpetrate a crime, without being caught. If you want privacy, so badly, and want to have against all notice, even though you guarantee that it will never impact anyone else, it won’t be allowed, because once achieved, you could commit a crime, with impunity.

We have delegated safety, security, and criminal investigation to elected and appointed civil authorities. You can’t yell “Freedom!” loud enough to just un-write social constructs developed nonstop since ancient Babylon.

14

I’m not understanding this.

You could live in a tent / cave / rustic shelter in the middle of nowhere, with no interaction with normal society for months / years on end (people have done so). Yet nothing about this arrangement exempts you from applicable laws - if you commit a crime you can be prosecuted and punished in just the same way as a city-dweller.

15

In 20 states, Counties are subdivided into civil townships, so if you’re in one of those states, & not part of a city or a town or a village, you’ll be part of a civil township. That’s my situation.

In the other 30 states, you’re still subject to county government.

16

She wasn’t homeless; she chose to live off the grid out in the desert. She worked with me … made the same money I made.

17

I’m kinda weird on this notion of “refusing fire services” … suppressing fires serves the public good … as fire likes to spread quickly … I don’t think we’re allowed to let our own house just burn and let the fire department wait until the entire fifty acres is burning before they can start to put it out … even Central Nevada has range fires and they are wicked …

18

The entire city (very small city) of Carmel in CA is like that. No one has an address-- homes and businesses are designated by what street they are on and how far from the nearest intersection they are. Lincoln, 3NW of 10th is a house on Lincoln, located on the west side of the street, 3 houses north of the intersection with 10th.

But that’s still an “official address”. It tells everyone exactly where you live.

19

I understand what you’re saying, but plenty of homeless people have jobs. They just have a job which doesn’t allow them to own a home or to rent anything.

He can’t opt out of taxes, he can’t opt out of emergency services. If he does opt out of taxes by living the freegan crust-punk homeless drifter lifestyle, he still can’t really opt out of emergency services because even the homeless have a theoretical right to some level of care in our society, but if he became a wild man of the woods, he’d be as close as he could get.

And, as watchwolf49 implies, even if he was a wild man of the woods, if those woods caught fire in an unapproved fashion which threatened buildings and such, he’d receive the benefits of wildland fire suppression whether he wanted them or not.

No. Here (Way Out West) there’s many many endless thousands of miles outside of towns, but they’re all inside counties or boroughs if you’re in Alaska. The people who live out there have no city water, no city sewer, no bus service, just as primitive as can be, but most of them are very much on the grid. There’s always some level of government between you and the state you’re in, if that’s what you mean.

In my experience, towns don’t expand to fill empty space. The town’s limits will pretty well approximate the land they can reasonably count on someone living on, for tax purposes, and they won’t try to spread themselves and their services out to cover the jackalopes and tumbleweeds.

So… if you live in a society, society takes some notice of you, regardless. There’s no “you can’t see me” spell you can cast, because if there were, criminals would be the first to do so, with the richest mob bosses doing it first and most avidly. If you have too much of that, parts of Nevada begin to resemble sovereign states run by criminal enterprises, and the legal, above-board, relatively boring casinos in Paradise, Nevada would be threatened by that. (Yes, Paradise. Las Vegas is a city with relatively little gambling, Paradise is a Census-Designated Place which is not a town but is in a county, simply to avoid Las Vegas taxes on places like The Strip. See what I said about towns not always expanding?)

20

I grew up on country land that had no address; we used a P.O. Box in town. My sister lives on the land now, but the county finally came along and assigned a street number. All told, with the generations, took about a hundred years.