A month later the county formally renumbered the whole road and each mailbox has a bright new blue 6x12" "house number" reflective sign. This meant they had to go through the property records and redraw all the plats with the new labels.
I don't have any idea how a city or country can do any kind of property taxation without formal addresses. Or a census. Or transfer of Real Property. There must not exist any kind of title insurance because without property and tax records you can't keep track of who owns what. I'm curious if the author consulted the tax office because street names are critical to the relation of ownership of property to physical location. Occasionally property records will reference "iron spike at corner of property" but those aren't definitive and move/get lost. Streets rarely change location or get lost.
From what I understand, property records, taxes & ownership were a huge problem up until ~10 years ago when all the disparate property record systems were merged into a nationalized, computerized, property record system.
To pay my property taxes, I just log into my county's website and pay with a Visa card. It's very easy.
Our property record uses GPS coordinates and relative distances from those points to determine the boundaries of the property. It's common to have the surveyors with their fancy laser & GPS machines come out during due diligence in a real estate transaction.
It feels pretty similar to the rest of the world now, though it hasn't always been this way.
Entering a property ID number will let you see the drawing of property lines, road frontages, concessions, etc. Can also see the ownership & transfer history, any liens, unpaid taxes, etc.
The website also gives you links to the neighboring properties and you can view those as well.
The website is only in Spanish and was built circa-2010 with circa-2005 UX, but it works, mostly.
There used to be a great podcast, LSAT Logic in Everyday Life, that permanently changed how attentive I am to logical constructions in lanuage -- but the reply below is correctly suggesting that it's kind of a drag to point this kind of stuff out except in very specific circumstances.
The legal record for one of my past houses was by Map and Plat number, not by street address. There is a mapping table between street address and tax lot, but it's not the legal record of the land. (That particular parcel was last changed in the early 1800s, but it seems like all of them are by what amounts to a locally unique identifier and then has an address mapped to it.)
In most of the US, property identification is entirely independent from a mailing address: your property identification is a completely unique description deriving from a series of land subdivision based on the Land Ordinance of 1785
1 square mile is 640 acres. That’s exactly the same size as a “section” in the US survey system. If I remember correctly, the smallest unit you could buy directly from the government was 1/8th of a section - a 40 acre square.
Maybe sometimes, but it's a different kind of failure when culture is demanded to accept any change imposed on it by some "system."
I can see some value systems where Costa Rica's address system is stupid and unjustifiable (and those value systems are very common among software engineers [1]), but I can also see value systems were it isn't (e.g. ones that value many things that "modernity" discarded in favor of technocracy).
[1] e.g. the value system of a former colleague of mine, who seriously believed that time zones should be abolished in favor of people using UTC for their daily life, mainly so it would be easier to handle time in software systems.
Not really. He was making a pretty serious error of not really understanding the "users," prioritizing his esoteric concerns over arguably more important ones, essentially forcing his users to serve his system instead of building the system for them.
I think a more apropos Ford quote would be the "you can have any color you want, as long as it's black," but that still doesn't capture it.
It's one thing to present something that meets the needs of your customers that they didn't anticipate, it's quite another to ignore those needs and just force the thing you want on them at great cost. He was only concerned with software engineers writing less time conversion logic, and cherry-picking to try to justify that idea. If you think about it, the whole thing is crazy and backwards, given how people use time 99% of the time and who is better at arithmetic.
For the Americans out there, I have to look at a Facebook page to see if a road near me is open or flooded too much to pass. Otherwise, I have to go an hour around.
People use Waze and other stuff to find places and there isn't a lot of letter sending these days, so while I agree with you that brushing this off as culture is an excuse for the corruption, I don't really see this as one of our top challenges either.
not much point in knowing where you're going if you can't get there
We also had 300" of rain last year, which is ...pretty extreme. I thought the infrastructure held up remarkably well given the rainfall.
>The explanation came from Geovanny Campos of Correos de Costa Rica, the company that manages the country's postal service. As he told Luis Fernando, San José’s growth was characterized by disorder. As the city expanded without following a pattern of rectangular city blocks, the established street numbers stopped making sense.
>Eventually, nobody used them.
Good grief. That's a failed system; like South Africa's electrical system, something that worked 10-20-30 years in the past but no longer does, because people (speaking in the aggregate) don't care enough to/are no longer able to keep it running.
I also found hadlock's and others' anecdotes enlightening. I'd vaguely had the idea that it was one of the small success stories of Latin America; all those Reddit TILs about how "Costa Rica abolished its army in the 1940s" and "Costa Rica last year ran 100% on renewable power for months". I am aware that Intel has a plant there. I know that Costa Rica supplies relatively few of the illegal aliens streaming across the US's southern border. Etc., etc. Welp.
(Of course, that last fact implies that CR, despite its woes, is still better off than much of the rest of Latin America, which itself says something.)