Watching the Alaska reality shows ive wondered this …
On Nat geo there’s one called “life below zero” and one of the people “glenn” on there has a one room shack and it appears to be the only living place in 200 miles
I would think his address would be the long and latitude location so you’d get 23 west by 45 east (or something like that ) Alaska
I live in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in an ordinary town and until about the year 2000 we didn’t have a street number. There is an official designation of the lot (something like Town of Somewhere, Tax Map X, Lot Y). Here in Maine every acre of land in the state is part of some town, township, city, or some other type of municipality so not being in a town isn’t an issue. The previous owners neighbors had a rural route mailing address (like Rural Route X, box Y) but we have always gotten our mail at a PO box and never put in a mailbox. The mailboxes in this neighborhood are in a cluster near an intersection, rather than one at the end of every driveway. The old box number that used to be assigned to the former owners of this house was reassigned to a new house built after we moved in. It wasn’t until the 911 system was extended to our town around the year 2000 that we were assigned an actual street number.
It undoubtedly varies by location, but I myself have had the privilege of living in “unincorporated county X” on more than one occasion. Not all land is part of a town.
I think it depends on where you are. There are, rather infamously, areas where you must pay a fire subscription service fee in order to get fire protection. If you don’t pay it, they will let your house burn down. They will likely act to prevent the fire spreading, but they won’t stop your house from burning. I never understood why this fee wasn’t just covered in the taxes for the property. older cite
In addition, in a large rural ranch situation, such as the one posited, the ranch owner may be on the hook for “first response”. The next closest response might be Department of Forestry, which may not happen very quickly in a truly rural setting.
You might also have a situation where the first response is an all volunteer fire department. I have lived in areas where this was the case. All volunteer FD got first call. DF got the second if deemed necessary.
I think, overall, this is likely to be one of those situations where the right to swing your fist ends where it hits someone else’s face. You might choose to let your house burn (out in the middle of nowhere, who would know) but if the fire spreads, sooner or later, an agency will be called in to deal with it. If the start of the fire is traced back to you (very likely), you will then be on the hook for arson and other assorted goodness if you haven’t acted appropriately to extinguish the fire. There are numerous cases of hunters/hikers who got lost and started a fire to signal for help. The fire spread and the parties are sometimes held to account.
I think if you want to do this, your best bet is to change up your scenario just a bit. Either lease the land from the property owner, so he or she is dealing with the outside world and you are not, or go squat somewhere in the millions of acres of Department of Forestry lands. The second option carries greater risk, but certainly people do it.
I know that in the county I would choose to do this in that there’d be no building code or anything to deal with. Esp. for a “movable” building.(I have relatives that know the rules about this stuff and have used them to their advantage.)
And no street address requirement once you get out in the boonies.
Such a rich person would definitely need a mailing address for tax and banking purposes. A box at a PO would suffice.
Note: You would have to notify the county about your building/property situation to make sure the proper assessments are made so you can pay your property taxes.
This situation might cause difficulties in terms of ID requirements. You may not be able to registered to vote depending on the local laws. (And the rules for “non-voter” ID might be the same.)
That would be an assessor’s parcel number, or APN, if anyone is interested. I couldn’t tell you what mine is and the post office doesn’t know either.
Up until about 2010, my mom had no street address. She had a PO box and if anything had to be delivered to the house, there were two ways to describe it. She started by trying Hwy XX, mile marker XXXXX (it was nearly in her front yard). Eventually she found out that all she needed to say was ‘the log house on Hwy XX’ and everyone knew where to go.
In that case (and I’m sure many others) the fee wasn’t covered in the property taxes because the taxpayers (through their legislators) wanted the choice of paying for the protection or not.* Nothing other than unwillingness prevented the county from including the fees to the various town and city fire departments in the county property taxes or funding its own fire department.
One of the weirder examples of the arbitrariness of addresses I’m familiar with is friends whose mailing address is in French Lick, Indiana - and that mailing address will get letters and boxes delivered to their front door, not a PO Box - but whose physical location is not in the same county as French Lick (Orange), but the next one over (Martin).
Makes getting a library card a pain in the ass. French Lick’s Library won’t give you one because you don’t live in Orange County, but the Shoals library in Martin County doesn’t want to give you one because your ID says French Lick. It was eventually figured out, but that was an adventure and a half.
For what it’s worth, while it’s a much smaller plot of land than posited in the OP, there are half a dozen people living on it in cabins and campers, as well as one actual house with a foundation. They all use the same mailing address. The house owners are the ones that own the land and pay the taxes.
There’s actually a reason for that - the “city” part of your mailing address would more accurately be referred to as the “post office” part. Because while I’m sure there are plenty of places where the zip code covers an entire city/town/village/county and nothing outside , there are also places where each zip code covers only a small part of a city and others where the zip code covers parts of multiple cities/towns/villages. And beyond that , the post office has certain conventions regarding the preferred and acceptable “city names” for each zip code. My mailing address does not include the city I live in. It doesn’t include my county. It does include the name of the post office that delivers my mail- which in my case is the name of my neighborhood. Although the people at the county library really should have known that you can have a French Lick mailing address and live in Martin county.
That makes sense!
Let’s assume the person at the library was new, so I can go on loving the world. 
When Andy Griffith left he Andy Griffith Show, the next three years continued with the other main characters as Mayberry RFD. The RFD stood for Rural Free Delivery. From 1890 to 1903, the US Post Office gradually universaslized the RFD system in order to assure all rural residents of free home mail delivery service. A resident simply informed the local post office of his presence, and install a mailbox on the road near his entryway. Nobody had an address, except “RFD, Mayberry”, and the rural carrier knew where to go to put your mail in your box.
RFD was not always the designation, If a town had several rural carriers, going in different directions on their route, it might have been addressed as RR-1 or RR-2, for Rural Route 1 or 2. If a householder decided to be off the grid, like the Unabomber, he could simply neglect to tell the Post Office, and if he wanted to receive mail, have it held at the post office in the nearest town, and go and pick it up. Mail coiuld always be sent to any addressee marked “General Delivery” at a certain city, and it would be held by the post office until someone came in and claimed it.
Things have changed since then.
The “address” (as the term itself suggests) isn’t actually a description of a location; it’s a set of directions about how to get a letter to you.
For that reason quite a lot of postal systems have the concept of the “post town”. The exact term used will vary from country to country, but basically the post town is the town from which your letters are delivered, and it will form part of your address. It may or may not be in the same county (or other administrative subdivision) as your property is; the most convenient place at which to process mail intended for you will be driven by factors like communications networks, population distribution, etc and only secondarily by local government administrative boundaries.
He’ll have to pay at least some taxes, land tax if nothing else. But if he’s rich enough he could make a deal with a law company, direct all mail to them, sign power of attorney forms and set up an investment fund which the law company can draw from to cover any expenses that come up. He’d never have to sign a thing or know about any paperwork that comes along.
And yes maybe legally you’d be supposed to have a road going there, but I bet you could pretty easily get away with just planting your modular home there without a permit or a road if the land is big enough.
He might not know about it, but the land would still have a description or “property address”, even if that address is only “SE 1/4 of the SW 1/4 of section 12, Township 17 South, Range 11 west of the Such-and-Such Meridian” (western U.S.), or the local equivalent.
In Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut (and almost, but not quite, Vermont), every bit of land is located in a town. Counties are basically non-existent in these states.
In most of the country, particularly more rural areas, counties are really the main municipal government (sometimes divided into townships). Every bit of land is within one county, and the county by default provides all the local services (roads, fire dept, police, schools, etc), unless a city or town (of some type, with various possible names) has been set up and by state authority been designated as the municipal service provider. The towns typically won’t cover an entire county, so the county still provides service to the rural areas outside of the city.
Every place on Earth has an “address” in some sense. Lat./Long. or even a mere 3 words. Such purely geographical location methods shouldn’t be considered quite the same as an address. Try sending a letter to Occupant/“barks quest exams”.
Would cause a bit of a problem when the county assessor visits the property to value it (happens every other year in my county). They don’t generally take helicopters.
Try getting a bank account to pay for the helicopter deliveries without some kind of mailing address. Or title even an off road vehicle (short of a horse) to go to town for supplies yourself. Or get internet to order the supplies.
Unless you’re living in a cave and totally off the land, you will need a way to get the things that it takes to eat, drink and shelter yourself from the elements that require a mailing address unless you go underground and extralegal a la drug traffickers, to get your needs met and that takes communication with the outside world.
The OP isn’t talking about an ordinary shlub but a quite wealthy person. Want supplies? Radio your flunkies what you want they’ll chopper it in. And the chopper itself? Buy one and hire a pilot. And none of this is in your name but run by a company you own. The company itself doesn’t even need a street address but one of those PO box fronts in the Caymans.
Need to physically go into town but not by air? Take an ATV to the nearest road, meet flunky, flunky takes you to town.
The world is very different if you have tons of money.
Indeed … I believe every square inch of the lower 48 States can be described this way … my own tax lot number is Range/Township/Section/Lot Number …
Well, the original 13 colonies plus Kentucky, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, Texas, parts of Maine, and I believe Hawaii have their own systems, which predate the Range/Township/Section of the public land survey system. Also, bits and pieces of other states have legal descriptions based on other schemes; I understand some areas of New Mexico, e.g., are described using the metes and bounds of the old Spanish land grants. However, most of the land area of the country, including Alaska, does use this system. The Dominion Land Survey used in the prairie provinces of Canada is very similar, using the same range/township/section nomenclature.