My uncle used to live on an old ranch road in west Texas. It didn't really go anywhere just connected to larger roads together, probably 20 miles long and kind of wound through a couple of minor valleys. Eventually all the road frontage on that road slowly got sliced up in to parcels for mini-ranches of 30-90 acres, the county sort of numbering them as they went along. Eventually the numbering system on that road got so messed up, someone called for an ambulance and died because the ambulance couldn't find the house.
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.
Thanks for your ground-truth insight. Does your county offer a "plat" where you can view your property plat number, and adjoining parcels? Surely it includes a road if your property has road frontage? I'm not sure how other countries handle it but in the US at least, seems to be fairly standardized from state to state with all of this information written on it.
Yes, it does. They call them a "plano". You can examine this all online in the national property registry.
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.
> I don't have any idea how a city or country can do any kind of property taxation without formal addresses
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
Western Canada has something similar to that too. Southern Saskatchewan (where most people live) is divided into a 1-mile grid. One of the things that still amazes me is that this mapping was started in 1871 using chains, compasses, and a couple other instruments... and as it turns out it was exceptionally accurate!
> Southern Saskatchewan (where most people live) is divided into a 1-mile grid.
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.
> 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.
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.)
I grew up on a street in a suburb that had originally been laid out by 'surveyors' in the colonising country on the other side of the world - it cut through a bunch of hillocks and a ravine and was chopped into 3 pieces ... we lived on the small middle piece ..... one day the local volunteer fire brigade got lost, we solved the problem by renaming our bit to be the same as another road that connected with it - the numbers didn't overlap so we kept them
The Department of Homeland Security paid out a lot of money for the standardization of addresses. Plenty of people who used to have RR (Rural Route) 4 for an address now have a five or six-digit house number, calculated from the center of the nearest town that somebody thought should be counted.
And I last lived in texas, the official location of my property had nothing to do with the postal address. Since the postal address is a federal invention, I'm pretty sure more local governments don't use them for property tax or other identification.
Deleted comment about confusing language, since not really relevant to topic of addresses, and probably not adding much.
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.
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.