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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

I encountered this the other day: friend of mine has a zip code associated with a major city, and puts the name of that city in their mailing address. But the land is not incorporated in any city. City government was trying to enforce city laws against them and use the mailing address as justification. Stupid.

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Paradise, Nevada -- an unincorporated town [1] under Nevada law in Clark County, which host all of the famous casinos of the Strip between Sahara and Mandalay Bay, as well as over 200000 people -- is definitely a real place, yet all domestic mailing addresses that are in Paradise, in ZIP codes like 89109, 89119, 89169 need to say 'LAS VEGAS'.

In Virginia, Henrico County, which surrounds the City of Richmond on three sides, petioned the US Postal Service in 2008 to allow 'HENRICO' as an acceptable label for affected ZIP codes that were used on its territory. Establishing a shared identity was a factor, but so was the fact that in some cases collected taxes were misappropriated to the wrong jurisdiction on account of a label lookup from the mailing address [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unincorporated_towns_in_Nevada [2] http://www.henricocitizen.com/index.php/news/article/address...

Isn't the primary idea of an unincorporated town that it doesn't 'exist' for purposes such as mail?

I think the primary idea of an unincorporated town is that it isn't incorporated as a municipality with its own government?

In places like Montgomery County, MD (which doesn't have incorporated individual towns) it would be very confusing if all the mail had to simply be addressed to "Montgomery County" despite the fact that almost everyone refers to its individual unincorporated areas as if they were actually separate towns.

All the unincorporated places I'm familiar with in the mainland US are under the jurisdiction of federal, state and county governments, but not a city or town government. I'm sure there are examples of more sovereign towns... US Postal Service is federal and required to service the whole country. Lots of cities and towns manage utilities like power, sanitation, etc. and would probably exclude unincorporated properties from access. People just buy them from county governments, private companies, etc.

I live in a part of a very small town where we get mail delivered via the post office for a neighboring town (both about the same size).

Mail sent to the zipcode for my "town" won't make it to me at all (due to some postmaster dispute going back 40+ years).

This fact in combination with Comcast's habit of auto correcting zip codes to match the town got my internet cancelled once when the paper bills stopped coming and I failed to keep up on calling to find out why and re-correcting their corrections.

The Post Office recently made a rule that all bulk mail needs to be validated through their address verification system. I run the mailing data for a fairly-large non-profit, and this was a fairly substantial change. A non-profit bulk letter costs $.17 or so, which is substantially cheaper than the first class letter rate.

We used to be able to include letters that failed address verification in our mailings, and a substantial portion would still get delivered. This was because the postmaster or the person sorting the mail would recognize errors the computer couldn't and put the letter in the correct bin.

Now if you want to get mail, you need to use your correct mailing address. I get a lot of angry calls because people aren't getting letters, but there isn't much we can do if the person put down their street address in a town where all the mail is delivered to a PO Box.

I'm not saying that is what happened to you, but it's ridiculous how many people stubbornly insist I put an address that is for all intents and purposes fake, when they have a perfectly valid mailing address. I'm not taking sides in these disputes, I just want to get the mail delivered.

Probably a part of the issue is that how zipcodes are defined is not actually publicly accessible information. You can pay private companies for it, sure.

I was going to point out that you can use R and tigris to get it, but that is only Zip Code Tabulation Areas, which don't map one-to-one to zip codes. Guess the Census Bureau and the USPS just can't get along.

USPS defines zipcodes as lists of addresses rather than areas.

They can be synthesized into areas, but they aren't designed as areas or intended to be useful for spatial analysis.

if you have actual addresses, I'd mention this API - https://locate.pitneybowes.com/geocode - which is good for turning addresses into lat/long coordinates, which are probably better for spatial analysis. Of course, with map data, its always nice to actually just look at the data points in aggregate first.

They should have been using census tracts all along. They're small enough for epidemiology in urban areas.

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