Why Addresses Have Numbers

Don't like the readability of the page.

Was quite interesting, especially the fact that house numbers were invented multiple times for different reasons and with different systems.

It got quite repetitive though, and I quit after roughly half of the read, when the even/odd number system was explained for the third time. Seems to be written with heavy AI assistance.

I live in Barcelona, and I dislike their house numbering system. In Buenos Aires, things are much more rational: one block is 100m.

So the first house may have a number somewhere between 0 and 20, depending on how far the entrance is from the corner. The last house number on that block will be below 100.

On the next block, the first house will be numbered somewhere between 100 and 110-120, depending on how many meters the entrance is from the second corner.

This system is amazing. Without much mental effort, you can understand how many blocks you need to walk to reach house 340 if you are starting from the first block.

In Barcelona, you can walk 400m and still see only four house numbers. It doesn't make sense at all. In addition, one side can be odds and the other even, but sometimes you have one side going 5, 10, 12, 22, and the other side of the street 453, 421, 411. There is no order.

They also use things like 26A, 26B, and 26C because each house cannot have its own number. And they also use ranges. My house, for example, is not Streetname 26. It's Streetname 26-28. Bonkers.

My house has a name, not a number, not that uncommon in the UK, especially for a 200-year-old building.

I think there’s a bit of false equivalence going on here as well regarding zip codes (several thousand addresses, or thereabouts) and a UK postcode (maybe 10-15 houses).

You could genuinely address a letter to me using something like:

4, L226ET

That’s all it would take. No, that’s not my address, characters within changed to protect the guilty, but my address could look just like that.

The southeastern Wisconsin system takes the address idea further, the address grid is tied back to the Milwaukee grid. A local official gives the example W156 N8480: roughly 156 streets west of the origin and 84 blocks north. He specifically notes that you can use the address to determine whether you need to travel north, south, east, or west. Wisconsin's statewide NG9-1-1 standards even explicitly recognize these two-direction grid addresses, giving W180N8085 as an example.

That is, in a navigational sense, superior to ordinary street addressing.

Take something like N90 W17567. Once you understand the system, you already know approximately where the destination is: the road lies about 90 blocks north of the baseline, while the property is about 175.67 blocks west of the north-south baseline. The address is essentially a human-readable coordinate pair.

In other words, if someone gives you an address like N90 W17567, and you understand the grid, you immediately know roughly how far north and west the property is without having to look up the street or pull out a map.

When discussing systems like the sequential vs the grid, the article misses one other important type of addressing: the metric system (used in most cities of Brazil for example). In this system the number are roughly the distance (in meters) from the beginning of the street (of course following the even/odd sides rule). This results in "messier" numbers than the grid system, numbers that don't match the hundreds to the block number, but it perfectly codify distances even in the presence of blocks of different sizes on different cities or neighborhoods. Also it works perfectly without blocks at all, a long road without any crossings can follow the same pattern, and when a city grows onto new lands and new blocks are carved by the side of those roads, the same old numbers continue working unchanged (this pattern can be seen clearly when old radial roads slowly turn into radial avenues as the city grows).

In Ireland, it isn't only rural addresses which have no house numbers. Plenty of houses even in towns had non-unique addresses before the introduction of eircodes. On my road, all the original houses (each standing on an acre plot) have numbers, but all the infill ones don't. You'd think the house built on the corner of 502's land might get 502A, but no. When my parents bought this house, the address was the same as many many others on the same road. They gave the house a name, so it would have a unique address, though the previous residents had managed fine for twenty years without one.

I had friends who rented around the corner. They had to give their address as "care of" the landlord's name, though the landlord didn't live there. That's because An Post knew his name, but wouldn't know the names of tenants.

If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_S...). It talks about why land parcels are squares (instead of strip farming, where fertile land was shared by many families), how we arrived at current measurement units and not "a basketful of grapes", standardization of monetary units, and a ton more. Excellent book.

† Some Addresses:

* https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

* 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489

* 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301

* 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24926417

When Australia decided every address should have a number (early 60s I guess) my grandmother simply refused to comply. She continued to use the name of the house in all correspondence (including the gas company, milkman, voting, whatever) until she finally moved out of her house around 1998 when she was also in her 90s.

A kot of things got regularized for E911 over time in the US. In my lifetime, I remember not having a street address--only a rural delivery route. (I think a PO Box got added at one one point though we didn't actually have or use the box.) And a cabin we would rent out from time to time didn't have an address either even as an adult. There were a lot of oddities around; roads with continuous numbering schemes where you couldn't actually drive from one end of the road to another.

Unrelated, Japan (shocker) has a totally different system, at least they used to.

Here in California, we have Carmel-By-The-Sea, which has had no street addresses for more than 100 years. The town is finally implementing them after endless resistance entirely because the basically static population has finally aged out enough that people's medical supply deliveries and the like can't get to the right houses.

On a side note, boy, this page is a nightmare of low-contrast design and ads everywhere on top of that.

Fun one: Costa Rican addresses are still often relative to a landmark. I used to have a subcontractor there, and his address was something like "500m north of the old church" (which IIRC wasn't even there anymore). It was kinda hard to figure out how to get this into the DHL website, but it always made it there.

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy the book _When Information Came of Age_ by Headrick. The chapters on maps and postal systems in particular have some overlap with this article.

Napoleon...the answer to this is Napoleon. Also, the odd vs even number thing comes from him too. Pretty weird that the page doesn't mention him at all.

House numbering is surprisingly interesting and diverse! Europe does it differently from the Americas, but Colombia has its own method, and so does Germany. (Infuriatingly, you can find both German and European house numbering in Berlin.) Some cities assign two numbers to a building on a street corner, one number for each street; some don't. Then again, some places like Brasília or Naberezhnye Chelny don't use streets as the "scope" for house numbers at all, and adopt numeration by neighborhood that looks like it's intended for robots not humans -- I used to go to a bar in Brasília whose address was CLS 409 bloco A. And some countries don't care for house numbers at all, like Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I have a feeling that someone has to have a special interest in all that. Hell, maybe I should write a blog post.

Another page that gets "cute" with javascript and in turn is unreadable because of it. (not technically unreadable, but waiting for the test to appear gets in the way to reading to the point where it isn't worth your time).