Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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 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.

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