Addressing What Matters: Look what the intern did!

Just 90 minutes North East of Orlando is a semi-rural neighborhood called East Silver Springs Shore.? It’s a new community known colloquially as “The Shores” conveniently located near Ocala.? I say it’s new because it’s been fully platted out, the streets have been named, but not all of the land parcels have yet been built upon.

Now addresses as we know are those necessary labels that we apply to our properties to ensure we can get our Amazon deliveries, friends can find us, emergency services can get to us quickly, and all those many other things we already understand addresses are useful for.

And, it is for all those reasons that the address, the thing I often describe as a “multi-field label” contains sufficient differences between properties to help us easily distinguish one address from another.? For instance, houses on the same street will have different numbers (or names) so we can tell them apart. And streets will have different names so we can know we are on the right one.? It’s the unique combination of the fields in the label that makes a unique address.

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In the US (and Florida is in the US despite some people's wishes) one of the least significant “fields” in that multi-field label is the called the Street Type.? Examples include (obviously) “Street”, “Drive”, “Circle” and so on.? It is so insignificant in fact that when giving addresses to friends, many Americans drop the Street Type from their description.? But not in The Shores, because when they addressed those streets, they decided to do something really stupid.

As you can see, the southern part of this large neighborhood uses the same street name, “Maluaka”, with a lot of different Street Suffixes.? The USPS maintains a list of all valid Street Suffixes and their correct postal abbreviations, you can check it out here.? As you will see it’s a very long list and it seems to me the intern responsible for creating the addresses in this neighborhood was clearly from an engineering school and was desperate to use as many Street Suffixes as possible. But the list from the USPS is so long, it was clear there weren't enough street for all the suffixes so with true engineering genius, the intern decided to use double-street suffixes like “Maluaka Run Court”.? And even most egregiously, triple-street suffixes like “Maluaka Radial Run Road”

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Now I am sure the residents have found a way to cope with this unusual street naming standard, but the stupidity doesn’t stop there.? You will notice I’ve highlighted two addresses with yellow circles.? This is just one instance of the same house number being used in near-identically named streets. In this case the number 69 (What Number Are We Thinking Of?):?

69 Maluaka Trak, Ocklawaha, FL, 32179

and

69 Maluaka Lane, Ocklawaha, FL, 32179

And they are just a 6-minute walk from one another.? I think we can all imagine the challenges faced by inviting new friends over for drinks, or the secret admirer sending flowers to the wrong house by accident, or the ambulance driving around in circles looking for the patient.

But wait, there’s more….all I’ve talked about is the southern part of the neighborhood.? There is a northern part where they’ve implemented the same kind of crazy only this time with the Street Name “Fisher” and this is so extensive, I could get less than half of it on a single screenshot.? Plus to the east of the Maluaka is the “Poinciana” ridiculousness.?

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Now in fairness, living in “Poinciana Trace Terrace” would make filling in government forms a little more exciting, and serve as a fun tongue twister for anyone taking my address over the phone. But if I could live in any well-named neighborhood in the US, I'd opt for this small and soberly named neighborhood in Fort Collins Colorado.

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