The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

I came across an initiative called Addressing the World, An Address for Everyone. Here, I learned for the first time that billions of people don’t have reliable addresses. Addresses, the UPU argues, are one of the cheapest ways to lift people out of poverty, facilitating access to credit, voting rights, and worldwide markets. But this is not just a problem in the developing world. Soon, I learned that parts of the rural United States don’t have street addresses either.

And far from being outlandish, the residents’ fears turn out to be justifiable, even reasonable. Addresses aren’t just for emergency services. They also exist so people can find you, police you, tax you, and try to sell you things you don’t need through the mail. West Virginians’ suspicions about the addressing project were remarkably similar to those of eighteenth-century Europeans who rebelled when governments slapped numbers on their doors—a story this book will tell.

Addresses allowed cities to “begin at the beginning.” With street addresses, you could find residents, collect information, maintain infrastructure, and create maps of the city that everyone could use.

The benefits were almost immediately obvious. Street addresses boosted democracy, allowing for easier voter registration and mapping of voting districts. They strengthened security, as unaddressed territories make it easy for crime to flourish. (On a less positive note, they also make

it easy to find political dissidents.) Water and electric companies had been forced to create their own systems for collecting bills and maintaining infrastructure—a street addressing system made that task far easier. Governments could more easily identify taxpayers and collect what they were owed.

According to census data, Second Street is the most common street name in America (some towns use Main instead of First Street), and seven out of the ten of the most common street names in America are numbers.

Modern street names do more than describe; they commemorate.

Street names are, in a way, the perfect propaganda tool. Saying them requires no thought or consideration, and, better yet, you are forced to use them every time you give directions, write your letters, or apply for virtually anything at all. The state can literally put words in your mouth. The Nazis understood this best of all.

Hitler’s man tasked with making the Nazi message stick. “The task of a gifted propagandist,” he wrote, “is to take that which many have thought and put it in a way that reaches everyone from the educated to the common man.” A simple message, repeated in the right context, could worm its way into the mind and feast forever. And what message is more simple than a street name?

Digital addresses will make life easier. But I don’t see them making it any richer.