How are new streets added to the map?
March 20, 2015 6:51 PM Subscribe
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I've had a midlife crisis and decided to dedicate my life to creating uninspired exurban developments . . .
So I buy a whole bunch of acres from a farmer in Exurban County, USA. I hire some contractors. Some months later, I've got a development, with houses and yards and streets. A whole bunch of streets that didn't exist before. Where the map used to show a blank space, there's now a stretch of asphalt. Apfelbond Street, Cormac Street, Plate of Beans Way, etc. How do these streets become official? How do they become actual addresses where human beings can receive mail? Is there a government agency where I register these new streets and these new plots of property? Do they forward this information to the post office? And while I'm on the topic, how do these new streets become added to Google Maps and other web resources?
Many thanks in advance, as always.
So I buy a whole bunch of acres from a farmer in Exurban County, USA. I hire some contractors. Some months later, I've got a development, with houses and yards and streets. A whole bunch of streets that didn't exist before. Where the map used to show a blank space, there's now a stretch of asphalt. Apfelbond Street, Cormac Street, Plate of Beans Way, etc. How do these streets become official? How do they become actual addresses where human beings can receive mail? Is there a government agency where I register these new streets and these new plots of property? Do they forward this information to the post office? And while I'm on the topic, how do these new streets become added to Google Maps and other web resources?
Many thanks in advance, as always.
pie ninja's basically got it. You have to plan out the whole development ahead of time (streets, lots, water and sewer, other utilities, grading, etc) and take it to your local jurisdiction with a bunch of supporting documentation (water quality reports, environmental assessments, traffic reports). If the city, county, or whatever decides that what you're doing works and can merge with existing city services, then you can go build it.
There's also a weird thing that can happen if the street never gets turned over to the town -- the street itself gets orphaned and the people who live there have to pay for street upgrades, plowing, etc. It's rare but it happens.
This is basically what happens in a gated community, which in my experience is just a condo development with different buildings. The HOA ends up owning the street, so if you look at an official property map, the rough outline of the street is just another property line and the street has a parcel number.
sometimes a development makes it through the official planning process at the municipal level, and makes it into the maps, but the streets (or one specific street) don't actually get built.
Sometimes, those streets still act as actual streets for zoning purposes, and you can't really build on them unless you convince the city to vacate the street. The city can still use those spaces for utilities and such. This is an area of San Diego where they laid out the streets in a grid and just ignored all the canyons. So, there's discontinuous little bits of the same street actually built, with empty lots on the steep hills between. If you go to map view, you can see that the property lines and streets are actually still there.
posted by LionIndex at 7:49 PM on March 20, 2015 [4 favorites]
There's also a weird thing that can happen if the street never gets turned over to the town -- the street itself gets orphaned and the people who live there have to pay for street upgrades, plowing, etc. It's rare but it happens.
This is basically what happens in a gated community, which in my experience is just a condo development with different buildings. The HOA ends up owning the street, so if you look at an official property map, the rough outline of the street is just another property line and the street has a parcel number.
sometimes a development makes it through the official planning process at the municipal level, and makes it into the maps, but the streets (or one specific street) don't actually get built.
Sometimes, those streets still act as actual streets for zoning purposes, and you can't really build on them unless you convince the city to vacate the street. The city can still use those spaces for utilities and such. This is an area of San Diego where they laid out the streets in a grid and just ignored all the canyons. So, there's discontinuous little bits of the same street actually built, with empty lots on the steep hills between. If you go to map view, you can see that the property lines and streets are actually still there.
posted by LionIndex at 7:49 PM on March 20, 2015 [4 favorites]
Meant to have a link in that comment to a map.
posted by LionIndex at 8:15 PM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by LionIndex at 8:15 PM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Generally, there's a municipal master plan at least sitting in a drawer somewhere.
In my city, for example, we have a road that runs from Major Arterial A, crosses a US Highway, and continues into a development where it more or less dead-ends. Beyond lies farmland, for now. But if you proceed on to the next State Highway, which has been converted into an expressway, they have actually built a crossing for that road (which also dead-ends in a cornfield), and it proceeds a little farther to a County Trunk Highway (which is actually named Y). The city is presuming that one day that farmland will be developed (despite some nods to sustainability) and that street is designated and built so that the two segments can be connected and serve as a thoroughfare all the way from A to Y.
Now, what does happen is that a developer may not be of the same mind as the city, and they want more cul-de-sacs and the like (which raise home values). Then what you can end up with is streets that are permanently discontinuous, that enter a subdivision and never seem to go anywhere, that terminate abruptly, and so on.
There are a lot of other things that can go on, as well. We have this unfinished sub up in the hills above town that's aimed at the 4x-median-and-above set. They originally only wanted one access road. There were two problems with it -- the fire department didn't think it was wide enough, and the residents already on the road wanted no part of the expected traffic. The ROW already existed and had been used by the water department to reach a new gravity tower, but no road was built there -- instead they found ways to get access from the north and south, giving it two handsomely built entrances and a major access road that bothered no existing neighbors. As it happens, the whole thing is getting to be ten years old and is only just now coming out of a zombie phase where it was under 5% developed. But the process involved getting all those approvals.
Other considerations might be topographical and drainage related. The city might want some sort of vegetative buffer, or a land feature, to shield existing residents (often this is class-related or race-related fear). The city may want part of the development zoned multi-family (apartments), for instance, or commercial (gas stations, etc.). The developer will need to get those approvals before proceeding.
Ultimately the city planners and development architects work very closely together, almost intertwined, going from project to project. There are plats that need to be filed, environmental permits obtained from the state or perhaps a conservation or lake district, plan commission approvals that must be obtained. In the last resort, a development might reach a city council or equivalent. And all before a single spade of dirt is turned.
Here's an example of another problem. A new development -- a hotel site turned home-improvement megastore and outlots -- was where the city built its first roundabout. Notice how the south connection is sort of strange? That's because the pre-existing development to the south was angry about the competition, and didn't want to make the connection, so for years it remained a weird dead end (with the occasional late-night crash). It was only recently that changes required by the outlots allowed the city to exercise some leverage and get that connection opened up.
And yes, it's pretty much the city (or other controlling entity, usually a municipality or township, but possibly a county) that will communicate the new stuff to the post office, and now to entities like Google. It's digital now, though, because of GIS.
posted by dhartung at 1:14 AM on March 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
In my city, for example, we have a road that runs from Major Arterial A, crosses a US Highway, and continues into a development where it more or less dead-ends. Beyond lies farmland, for now. But if you proceed on to the next State Highway, which has been converted into an expressway, they have actually built a crossing for that road (which also dead-ends in a cornfield), and it proceeds a little farther to a County Trunk Highway (which is actually named Y). The city is presuming that one day that farmland will be developed (despite some nods to sustainability) and that street is designated and built so that the two segments can be connected and serve as a thoroughfare all the way from A to Y.
Now, what does happen is that a developer may not be of the same mind as the city, and they want more cul-de-sacs and the like (which raise home values). Then what you can end up with is streets that are permanently discontinuous, that enter a subdivision and never seem to go anywhere, that terminate abruptly, and so on.
There are a lot of other things that can go on, as well. We have this unfinished sub up in the hills above town that's aimed at the 4x-median-and-above set. They originally only wanted one access road. There were two problems with it -- the fire department didn't think it was wide enough, and the residents already on the road wanted no part of the expected traffic. The ROW already existed and had been used by the water department to reach a new gravity tower, but no road was built there -- instead they found ways to get access from the north and south, giving it two handsomely built entrances and a major access road that bothered no existing neighbors. As it happens, the whole thing is getting to be ten years old and is only just now coming out of a zombie phase where it was under 5% developed. But the process involved getting all those approvals.
Other considerations might be topographical and drainage related. The city might want some sort of vegetative buffer, or a land feature, to shield existing residents (often this is class-related or race-related fear). The city may want part of the development zoned multi-family (apartments), for instance, or commercial (gas stations, etc.). The developer will need to get those approvals before proceeding.
Ultimately the city planners and development architects work very closely together, almost intertwined, going from project to project. There are plats that need to be filed, environmental permits obtained from the state or perhaps a conservation or lake district, plan commission approvals that must be obtained. In the last resort, a development might reach a city council or equivalent. And all before a single spade of dirt is turned.
Here's an example of another problem. A new development -- a hotel site turned home-improvement megastore and outlots -- was where the city built its first roundabout. Notice how the south connection is sort of strange? That's because the pre-existing development to the south was angry about the competition, and didn't want to make the connection, so for years it remained a weird dead end (with the occasional late-night crash). It was only recently that changes required by the outlots allowed the city to exercise some leverage and get that connection opened up.
And yes, it's pretty much the city (or other controlling entity, usually a municipality or township, but possibly a county) that will communicate the new stuff to the post office, and now to entities like Google. It's digital now, though, because of GIS.
posted by dhartung at 1:14 AM on March 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
Best answer: I bought a large farm property that didn't have an address. It used to; I think everything got re-configured with better addresses at some point in like the 90s (for better 911 access?) and this property was vacant at the time so it never got one. So when we bought it, it had several numbers associated with it for various utilities, but not of them actually existed as far as the county was concerned.
I somehow ended up in touch with someone at the county who was responsible for this sort of thing. I told her which numbers were in play for the utilities, and we looked at the map and said "yeah it's south of 202nd St and then the next house after yours is numbered 204xx so let's call you 203xx." (It might help that we are the only property between 202nd St and 204xx, so we could've picked any 203xx we wanted, really.)
posted by librarina at 10:41 AM on March 21, 2015
I somehow ended up in touch with someone at the county who was responsible for this sort of thing. I told her which numbers were in play for the utilities, and we looked at the map and said "yeah it's south of 202nd St and then the next house after yours is numbered 204xx so let's call you 203xx." (It might help that we are the only property between 202nd St and 204xx, so we could've picked any 203xx we wanted, really.)
posted by librarina at 10:41 AM on March 21, 2015
Best answer: Yeah, rural numbering across the U.S. had to be standardized and nailed down for Enhanced 911, where it gives the operator the location automatically. Pretty much all counties/townships had to set up an E911 conversion process in order to comply.
Generally property owners have some discretion in choosing an address among those that the property's street frontage covers, which is especially pleasing for commercial or apartment buildings that want a nice, clean "500 Maple" type of address. If you do any historic property research, you find that most communities started with just a 1, 2, 3 consecutive system, often starting wherever a street started, and I believe it was a Postal Service requirement that they simplify and standardize *that*, leading to "100 block", "200 block" numbering systems with a centerline for both north/south and east/west numbering. As you can imagine, this can play havoc with your inquiries, as you need to know not only the property's current address, but any that it used previously (and this doesn't even deal with street name changes, of which there were also plenty, like the two streets on opposite sides of a river that got connected by a bridge, or the numbered streets that aren't going in the same direction, or the streets that were part of different plats or jurisdictions and now have the same name but aren't close, connected, or running in the same direction. It's all loads of fun, I assure you.
posted by dhartung at 9:46 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Generally property owners have some discretion in choosing an address among those that the property's street frontage covers, which is especially pleasing for commercial or apartment buildings that want a nice, clean "500 Maple" type of address. If you do any historic property research, you find that most communities started with just a 1, 2, 3 consecutive system, often starting wherever a street started, and I believe it was a Postal Service requirement that they simplify and standardize *that*, leading to "100 block", "200 block" numbering systems with a centerline for both north/south and east/west numbering. As you can imagine, this can play havoc with your inquiries, as you need to know not only the property's current address, but any that it used previously (and this doesn't even deal with street name changes, of which there were also plenty, like the two streets on opposite sides of a river that got connected by a bridge, or the numbered streets that aren't going in the same direction, or the streets that were part of different plats or jurisdictions and now have the same name but aren't close, connected, or running in the same direction. It's all loads of fun, I assure you.
posted by dhartung at 9:46 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
Once the plans are approved, THEN you get to go in and actually build the streets. At some point in there you go to the property assessor and registry of deeds to record your new parcels. And then usually there's a formal point at which control of the actual physical streets goes from the developer (you, in this scenario) to the municipality.
There's also a weird thing that can happen if the street never gets turned over to the town -- the street itself gets orphaned and the people who live there have to pay for street upgrades, plowing, etc. It's rare but it happens.
The other weird thing that happens is paper roads -- sometimes a development makes it through the official planning process at the municipal level, and makes it into the maps, but the streets (or one specific street) don't actually get built. If you ever see a named street on Google Maps that doesn't actually show up on an aerial photograph, that's probably what's going on.
posted by pie ninja at 7:27 PM on March 20, 2015 [14 favorites]