No home in Carmel, California has an address. That's about to change | Hacker News Reader

No home in Carmel, California has an address. That's about to change

sfgate.com

34 pointsStratoscope26 comments

For most of the '90s I worked in the building with Clint Eastwood's restaurant next to the Carmel post office and lived a few blocks away. I've never lived anywhere else that the post office was such a social hub. Political candidates would turn up to press the flesh and ask for votes. I argued with the state governor about education policy in front of my PO box. He didn't like school vouchers. There was a running joke about all of the seniors who planned their day around picking up their mail.

A lot of that crowd must have turned over since then to allow for such a shocking change as home addresses. But hell will freeze before they allow home mail delivery. Or not, the world sometimes changes, even in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

I live in an area where houses didn't get addresses unless they were inside a city. The fire services developed an addressing scheme that encoded location and used that. Eventually the postal service adopted it as official in the 1960s [1].

I'm surprised that this hasn't already happened in Carmel (not that they would use the same system, just that the fire department didn't already have an unofficial numbering system).

[1] https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/pub28apd_004.htm

Back when Australia decided to require street addresses my grandmother decided to simply ignore it. I suppose this was the late 50s or early 60s. She continued to use her house name on all letters and official forms well into the late 1990s until she was old and decrepit enough to need to move into a home (she was in her late 90s herself). As far as I could tell everything continued to work fine, and I just sent letters to her at "Riccarton", Aldgate, SA.

Australia being Australia there are plenty of far more sketchy addresses in the more rural areas.

Same in the US. I technically have a street address but all of my paperwork just has plat map/parcel information. Sort of a pain when trying to validate your address.

No mail delivery still. And when places won't ship to a PO box the post office workers have a few hacks you can use for addressing that'll get your mail where it needs to go. Plus it's a small town, they learn who's mail goes in what box pretty quickly.

> my grandmother decided to simply ignore it

I've tested sending letters to my name, small town, state. C'est tout.

They deliver. Granted, I'm in a town of 10,000 with no postal service to the address: you need a P.O. box or private mailbox. Still, neat a letter will route correctly from New York to Wyoming with just a name and town.

I once sent a letter to the Polish embassy in New York City. I got the street number wrong. It came back many weeks later stamped as undeliverable because the address does not exist.

I remember reading or watching something ages ago about how the US postal service has a special office for deciphering non-standard addresses to ensure delivery. I think they were on a company retreat when my letter was passing through.

This actually works fine in the USA where I live now. In the few letters I actually send I usually simply write the person's or company's name and the post code (zip code).

This postal trivia is becoming more amusing all the time -- I check my mailbox once every 6-8 weeks, or even less, and rarely have more than one or two items in that time. I get the impression that nobody bothers to use the postal service for anything important any more.

The postal service routing system developed into a highly fault-tolerant system, by necessity. You may intentionally omit required information, but the system doesn't know that. It could also have been obscured, damaged, etc. The machines try as hard as they can to get the letter as close to the destination as possible and then a human takes over. Unless your local postal carrier is a jerk, it is highly likely to succeed. Even in NYC/LA/Chicago: the postal carrier has a small area they are responsible for, they are just as likely to know all the names as a postal carrier in a small town.

> Even in NYC/LA/Chicago: the postal carrier has a small area they are responsible for, they are just as likely to know all the names as a postal carrier in a small town

A full name and zip code are also frequently unique.

> I get the impression that nobody bothers to use the postal service for anything important any more.

Try to send invitations to parties by email and see how many actually reads their mailbox filled to the brink with spam.

I want everything important from companies by snail mail. Friends etc. could use sms, telephone or snail mail. People don't seem to read private e-mails that often and a lot are missed. Me included.

Note, I am referring to private correspondence. At work I check my email properly.

Homes in Carmel already have addresses, so they'll now be official in some way they weren't before?

Here's a house on Zillow, with the house number clearly visible. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/26387-Isabella-Ave-Carmel...

Google Maps https://www.google.com/maps/place/26387+Isabella+Ave,+Carmel...

Apple Maps https://maps.apple.com/?address=26387%20Isabella%20Ave,%20Ca...

There is something fishy though.

Searching for the address in Bing Maps shows the correct structure, but I can't seeem to generate a link with the address. The link is lat long. https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=36.54084%7E-121.930825&lvl=19.7

Open Street Maps address queries don't seem to work, and when I select that location on the map, the geocoded address is incorrect but close. https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?from=36.54084%2C-12...

What Carmel needs are affordable addresses, but that's a different problem entirely.

Asking for affordable addresses in Carmel is like asking for affordable cars at a Maserati dealership. They just don't stock those there. Instead you need to drive to a Hyundai or used car dealership. If you want an affordable home you drive to Seaside or Salinas. I rented a room in Carmel for about the same price as a coworker rented a nice ranch house in Seaside.

I wanted an affordable handheld supercomputer in the 1970s, and I finally got one! They are making new real estate, but it's not for sale yet.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/aerial-view-isaac-hale-bea...

The article doesn’t even attempt to explain this, but this is talking about Carmel-by-the-Sea, a small part of the greater Carmel area.

I’ve not seen any street addresses, just house names, in my few dozen trips where I have walked through Carmel-by-the-Sea.

I neglected to check the boundary of Carmel-by-the-Sea, and you are correct, thanks! I happened to pick a nearby address outside the boundary. Here's a house in Carmel-by-the-Sea named "Carmel House" according to the placard on the dwelling.

https://www.google.com/maps/@36.5481627,-121.9235433,3a,73y,...

I feel bad for map developers. Searching Google Maps for Carmel House yields a house at 26177 Scenic Rd, not the house at the above link.

Within Carmel-by-the-Sea, some addresses on Zillow are like "Lincoln 7sw 13th," but that address is not known to Google Maps.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Lincoln-7sw-13th-Carmel-B...

Certain addresses on Zillow appear to be in standard form, such as 225 The Crossroads Blvd, Carmel, CA 93923, but notice the URL isn't Carmel-by-the-Sea. EDIT: Nevermind, that address is clearly erroneous, the house is on Delores St.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/225-The-Crossroads-Blvd-C...

Putting that address into Google Maps returns a location in The Crossroads Shopping Center, not the location in Zillow.

Years ago, I had to routinely redo my searches for Carmel addresses, since Google Maps assumed I was referring Carmel Valley near San Diego, zip 92130, not Carmel-by-the-Sea. That changed at some point; Carmel now "redirects" to Carmel-by-the-Sea. There is also a Carmel Valley zip 93924, east of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Emergency services should as is be required to use GPS or similar, especially in the U.S. given the existence of the United States National Grid (https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NCAT/), as house numbers may be not be available for a variety of reasons. Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20970664

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359256

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829267

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27015046

The issue is that they need to enter their destination somehow. Or do you expect people calling 911 to read off GPS coordinates?

It should at least be an option. I called 911 about a situation some miles outside of town far from any street names. But I had the exact GPS coordinates and read them off to the dispatcher. To my surprise that dispatcher seemed to have no idea what GPS coordinates were.

Addresses are useless if you don't know them.

I once had to call 911 at a local streetcar station, and since it didn't have an obvious address, being in the middle of a street, I'm trying to identify it by station name, and they had a very hard time of it.

GPS should be expected to be an option given its prevalence, the consideration that the supplement(s) are required to be derived using an electronic device - a telephone does not work without electricity, and the urgency to implement.

> GPS coordinates

* coordinates

There are many methods for determining ones lat and long that do not involve one particular GNSS constellation.

In the vast majority of applications you will get GPS coordinates even when the source is a non-GPS constellation. The WGS84 datum is the lingua franca of coordinate systems and what most systems expect by default if not otherwise specified.

When you call from a cell phone, public safety answering points get your gps data from the carrier. Landline calls have their associated address data sent. This is called e911 and has been a thing for over 20 years.

The person answering the call will ask for a specific address, but does not need it to send help towards you.

https://www.fcc.gov/general/9-1-1-and-e9-1-1-services

Eventually, a 911 PSAP should (but does not always) eventually get decent geographical coordinates -- that's part of what the E911 system is intended to provide.

When it does work (and it usually does work): It's not always instant, it isn't always accurate (the first hit may just be the coordinates of a cell tower -- good luck!) and it doesn't always work inside of buildings. And for some callers some of the time, things like VOIP won't deliver the correct location to a PSAP because things are broken or databases are simply wrong.

And in the best case: It can only reveal the calling party's location, which is not necessarily the location where people actually need help. And it only necessarily reveals that calling party's location to the 911 operator.

It's still generally the job of a human dispatcher to relay that information to the boots-on-the-ground who will actually show up and help the people who need that help.

It's nice to think of it as some tightly-integrated system where somehow the information is, say, relayed automatically from the caller's phone, through CAD, and all the way to the dashboard satnav of an ambulance so they can just hop in and go.

But what usually happens (in my experience hanging around in 911 PSAPs) is that the location is relayed to first responders by human voice over radio.

And addresses are easy to relay by voice.

> The person answering the call will ask for a specific address, but does not need it to send help towards you.

It's important to provide an address because addresses are useful to the 911 operator. E911 is awesome, but it is not an all-knowing, all-seeing system that is somehow born from perfection.

PSAP only gets down to 300 yards though, right?

Carmel already is everything the no address loving lawbreakers imagine Carmel will become if it is compliant with the law.

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