I’m doing census work and was sent to an apt complex where there’s a tangle of multiple driveways and three jagged streets. The streets are named like this:
Penelope
Penelope N
Penelope S
The problem is that the residents have no idea which street they live on. I visited a unit and (following my script) asked, “Is this 1434 Penelope North, Unit 5?”
The occupant immediately responded, “This is Penelope South!” (And he had already filed for his Pen South address.)
I said goodbye (thinking the guy was deluded), since the street was on the north side of the apt. complex. There was a different tenant checking his mailbox nearby. I asked if this was Penelope N or S. He laughed and said it’s both. He looked at an envelope and said, “This says South.”
I went to the rental office and pointed out the window and asked, “Is that street Penelope North or Penelope South?” They put up their hands and said, “Technically it’s North, but the Post Office thinks it’s South.”
I asked if there was any overlap on apt. numbers — is there a 123 North and a 123 South? Nope, all address numbers are unique.
I attached an elaborate case note, saying the occupant had filed under a different address, and explained the situation. A week later I was assigned 40 units in the complex! A few of them WERE the same unit number… one North and one South.
I’ll fight my way through this, but I’d like to possibly fix the problem in time for the 2030 Census. Who should I contact? (There are no helpful street signs in the complex.) Does anyone know if @MrDowntown is still around the board?
I think whichever government entity in that area responsible for overseeing the 911 system is likely the best outfit to contact. Right now it’s just polling information, but in the event of an emergency, that could have immediate and tragic, even deadly, consequences.
So…maybe an email to someone at city hall (city administrator/supervisor, maybe?) and CC the local USPS postmaster and the fire chief.
On second thought, before getting people at the city involved, it may be faster to check the tax records on the buildings and see what the addresses say. Also, you could call the landlords and ask them or call the post office, since they presumably deliver the mail successfully every day.
When we built our house on an empty lot (weird shaped block, only one other house on this street section) I went to the post office to find out what number to put on the mailbox. Was told the city assigns the number. Took guesses of what number we would get based on the house numbers of the houses along our back lot line. Considering the neighbor directly behind us was 823 we guesses 822, 824, maybe 826. Ended up with 830. Mail carrier agreed that was an odd choice but that is what the city assigned.
If your community is served by an Emergency Management Agency, you might contact them. When addresses were being changed due to 911 rules around here, the EMA was in the middle of it.
Mailing addresses and street addresses are not always the same thing. I’d be willing to bet that if someone in that complex called 911, it would probably return the complex’s main address, and maybe the building number. The mailing addresses are actually more of a USPS thing- if you live at #334 Building A, in the “Winds at Vista Bay” (or whatever), your address may be on whatever street is closest; the letter carrier probably has it sorted by +4, so that is likely the building or something, so he just goes to building A’s mailbox for -3320, building B’s for -3321, and so on.
All that said, I think I’d go to your city’s (or county if you’re not in a city) planning and development department. They’re probably the ones who would straighten that out.
Here’s an article about why they’re not always the same. An example they use is where the mailing address is in a different locale than the physical location, due to USPS delivery circumstances. An example is that my mother lives in Meadows Place, TX. Since Meadows Place is tiny, and shares a zip code with Stafford (a much larger town), addressing things/looking it up by Stafford works much better.
I would imagine for census purposes at an apartment complex, it probably doesn’t really matter. I doubt the difference between them is going to be material for the purposes of aggregating census information. That said, I would guess the street address is what they’d use, as it’s the better representation of the physical location, and in fact apparently the Census Bureau is one of the authoritative sources for physical location information with its TIGER database.
I’d guess that those “streets” are merely private driveways owned by the apartment complex. What is their official name is mostly a matter between USPS and the property owner, though of course it gets more complicated if there’s a chance an apartment dweller will want to use it as part of telling a 911 operator where she is.
The municipality or county might have an “addressing supervisor” who’d be interested in learning about the situation. Depending on your spare time and personality, if it bothers you enough, you might talk your way up the chain of command by getting someone at the local fire station concerned.
OP here. Thank you to everyone offering information. I’ve definitely learned some things and, depending on available time and energy, will probably drop a few stones into the water. If anything happens I’ll post an update.
That’s a little different, though. The “City, State” in a mailing address would more accurately be described as “Post Office” because that’s really what it is. But I’ve never heard of ( nor does that article describe) USPS changing the names of streets for mailing addresses where someone could say “it’s really North, but the Post Office thinks it’s South”
Poster above is correct in contacting whatever government agency is in charge of addresses. Now, which one is it? In my case, it’s the county. They (we) do all the coordination between cities and 911 re addresses. We even contact public service to update their address and assign most new addresses. Specifically county GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Planning, Building and Assessor departments may play a part as well. One of those departments though should know who to contact.
Now it’s not always that easy. If someone has a bad address, it can be difficult to change. There can be many documents associated with an address. And sometimes, understandably, many people are very reluctant to change their address. If not down right hostile.
Maybe in some cases, but not all. Census-designated places are not part of an incorporated community but the "post office " in a address can share a name with an incorporated municipality or part of one. The “city” in my address is not the name of the actual city I live in , it’s the name of the neighborhood I live in, which is also the name of the post office. There are people who live within the limits of Municipality A but get their mail delivered by a carrier assigned to the post office named for Municipality B - their mailing address include Municipality A.
100% of the mailing addresses around her are PO boxes, so they differ from the physical address. My POB is in a different county than which I live. I myself do not live in an incorporated area (town).
Since we don’t get mail delivery, some of the physical addresses don’t really work out. Nobody notices or cares (well I do)
This was me from about 2000-2015. And our municipality was a rapidly infilling area of about 30K people within a few miles of the then-edge of expanding suburbia; not some distant rural crossroads.
Back in the day municipality = post office name held for almost all non-rural USA. Because getting a PO in every incorporated town/village/whatever local term was one of the big things Congresscritters did to make constituents happy.
Now that USPS isn’t a government department, carriers drive instead of walk, and automation permits fewer larger post offices to be good enough, we’ve been seeing more and more areas where new municipalities are served by existing POs with different names.
Even setting aside the current political furor over the President vandalizing the USPS, expect this to only accelerate as traditional mail becomes a smaller and smaller part of our lives.
Yeah - 911 and emergency services make it critical to get a street name corrected. However, you as a Census worker have limited abiity to push for this. Really, the apartment tenants and the property manager should be pushing to correct this.
Personal anecdote: Our street is a double-ended cul-de-sac - connected to the main road by a connector, which has nothing on it but the mailboxes for the neighborhood and serves no purpose except to connect our street to the main road. All the houses on our street are something like 123 Mystreet Road.
The connector had a separate name. So you’d come down Main Blvd, and turn onto Uselesslynamed Way, go 50 feet, then turn right or left onto Mystreet Road.
Only… some services listed this connector as Mystreet Road, and others listed it as Uselesslynamed Way.
When neighbors of ours had a (fortunately minor) kitchen fire, they called 911… and the fire truck went right past our street.
After that, we pushed with the HOA and then the county to get rid of Uselesslynamed Way and rename the whole thing Mystreet Road.
That’s a heck of a lot better than what my neighborhood in Beijing has. Way back before the pandemic, I’d always have the DiDi (like Uber) driver take me to the south gate of my apartment complex because my building is next to that gate. The navigation app, for the last part of the journey, tells the driver, “Take the (Main Road name) exit, proceed 500 meters and turn left onto unnamed road; proceed 600 meters and turn right onto unnamed road; proceed 300 meters and turn left onto unnamed road; your destination is 200 meters ahead and on your left”.
That’s here in China. Back in South Korea just a few years ago, the addressing system was completely revamped so it makes sense and it’s easy for the police, firefighters, and ambulance drivers to find the damn address so you don’t die while they’re wandering around looking for the address using that absolutely useless old system. The current system was driven, as I mentioned, by the need for the emergency services to get somewhere in a hurry and to get to the right place. There is a system in place for getting names changed, too.
