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

For most of the &#x27;90s I worked in the building with Clint Eastwood&#x27;s restaurant next to the Carmel post office and lived a few blocks away. I&#x27;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&#x27;t like school vouchers. There was a running joke about all of the seniors who planned their day around picking up their mail.<p>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&#x27;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].<p>I&#x27;m surprised that this hasn&#x27;t already happened in Carmel (not that they would use the same system, just that the fire department didn&#x27;t already have an unofficial numbering system).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pe.usps.com&#x2F;text&#x2F;pub28&#x2F;pub28apd_004.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pe.usps.com&#x2F;text&#x2F;pub28&#x2F;pub28apd_004.htm</a>

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 &quot;Riccarton&quot;, Aldgate, SA.<p>Australia being Australia there are plenty of far more sketchy addresses in the more rural areas.

Homes in Carmel already have addresses, so they&#x27;ll now be official in some way they weren&#x27;t before?<p>Here&#x27;s a house on Zillow, with the house number clearly visible. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zillow.com&#x2F;homedetails&#x2F;26387-Isabella-Ave-Carmel-CA-93923&#x2F;19332599_zpid&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zillow.com&#x2F;homedetails&#x2F;26387-Isabella-Ave-Carmel...</a><p>Google Maps <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;place&#x2F;26387+Isabella+Ave,+Carmel-By-The-Sea,+CA+93923&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;place&#x2F;26387+Isabella+Ave,+Carmel...</a><p>Apple Maps <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.apple.com&#x2F;?address=26387%20Isabella%20Ave,%20Carmel,%20CA%20%2093923,%20United%20States&amp;ll=36.540781,-121.930818&amp;q=26387%20Isabella%20Ave" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.apple.com&#x2F;?address=26387%20Isabella%20Ave,%20Ca...</a><p>There is something fishy though.<p>Searching for the address in Bing Maps shows the correct structure, but I can&#x27;t seeem to generate a link with the address. The link is lat long. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bing.com&#x2F;maps?cp=36.54084%7E-121.930825&amp;lvl=19.7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bing.com&#x2F;maps?cp=36.54084%7E-121.930825&amp;lvl=19.7</a><p>Open Street Maps address queries don&#x27;t seem to work, and when I select that location on the map, the geocoded address is incorrect but close. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;directions?from=36.54084%2C-121.93083&amp;to=#map=19&#x2F;36.54030&#x2F;-121.93113" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;directions?from=36.54084%2C-12...</a><p>What Carmel needs are affordable addresses, but that&#x27;s a different problem entirely.

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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geodesy.noaa.gov&#x2F;NCAT&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geodesy.noaa.gov&#x2F;NCAT&#x2F;</a>), as house numbers may be not be available for a variety of reasons. Previous discussions:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21196402">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21196402</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20970664">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20970664</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37359256">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37359256</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31829267">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31829267</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27015046">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27015046</a>

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