I have heard of a handful of cities in Latin America where some districts (or even most of the city) have no street names (or street numbers) and of course no house numbers, either. However, I had no idea that this is a problem in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Moreover, it hadn't occurred to me that living in an area where you simply don't have a street address generally means you can't have a bank account, can't vote and so forth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32444811

That is definitely something that many of us probably never really think about. My ex-husbands family lives in a part of Mexico where the roads don't have names and there are no house numbers. If any of their family members living here in the U.S. wants to send them something, they have to send it to someone they know that lives in the nearest city. Even having experience with that, I had never thought of how wide-spread it really is.

Thanks for sharing the link! I often talk to my students (I'm a Spanish teacher) about the difference in the way we live here and how people live in other countries. This is not something I had ever thought of to discuss with them, but I think it would make for a good conversation with them next time we talk about things we take for granted.

Thanks. The linked article says that four billion people don't have a street address , which would be over half the world's population!

The article also says that people without a street address are precluded from running a business. I wonder if that is strictly true. Even in countries where street addresses are standard some businesses operate from 'addresses of convenience' - by which I don't necessarily mean post box addresses. Presumably, provided everything is (more or less) above board and their bank accepts the address, it is possible to run a business.

(An aunt of mine used to earn a living by providing small companies with a prestige address in central London: she had a small office suite at that address and companies could use that address and pretend they operated from there. I remember that when I visited her in her office I used to boggle at the number of companies that had name plates at the entrance saying it was their registered office. They were able to rent part of the suite to meet clients and so forth. She also forwarded mail, took phone messages, etc.).

I'm sure that it limits their abilities to have certain types of business, or businesses in the sense that we would normally view them. In some of those regions, though, they can have small, home-based businesses that provide services for the area, nothing major. For example, in the community where my ex-husband's family lives, one of the residents has a store that she runs out of a room in her house. She goes in to town and gets supplies and then sells them to the people living there for a higher price. She makes her money from the profits, and they can get basic supplies without having to drive to town. So if they only need toilet paper, it's easier and cheaper to buy it from her, but if they need a lot of supplies, it is better for them to go into town themselves.

I think it's great that your aunt was able to provide that service for those businesses that needed an address. That definitely was a positive influence on the local economy. I just finished taking a Master's course on organizational systems of society and this would have been a good article to share in class discussion. We did have to read a book called "The Bottom Billion". It was a good read and talked about failed/failing States. It was written at a time when the world population was around six billion, and it's grown since then. There are many issues that people in those countries deal with on a daily basis that some of us have never even contemplated.

In the US, people that are eligible to vote without an address can vote in Federal elections but they cannot vote in state or local elections because they cannot prove they live in that electoral district. They cannot use a post office box from the postal service because they would need a street address to get one. However, if they have a box at a mail receiving place not run by the postal service, they can use that as a street address as long as the address doesn't have Box Number in the address. Banks don't care if you have a street address or not. They only need a mailing address. An employer needs an address of some kind too. Same thing with a license of any kind. A physical address is needed.

So that raises the question, how do street addresses get made in the first place? If I build my house on a road somewhere, who gives me the house number? Or if I build an entire housing development? Does the developer get to name the streets and house numbers? Does the (U.S.) Postal Service get to decide if they will deliver mail or not, or do they have to? "If you build it, they will come."

In Belgium, the street name and house number are given by the local authorities, together with the building permit.