Issued by:
Bureau of Geographic Information (MassGIS)
Office of Information Technology (MassIT)
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Version 1.0, Issued December 2016
Preface
What is this document about?
Addresses identify locations where people live and work and play. Accurate, consistent, and complete addressing supports better communications, easier travel, and more efficient delivery of goods and services; it may even save lives by expediting emergency response. This standard provides guidance on how addresses should be assigned and how they should be stored and managed using computer software.
Who is the intended audience?
The intended audience is staff in local government who are involved in address assignment or who use addresses in their daily work, as well as the vendors that provide them with services and software.
How does this standard apply to my municipality?
Every municipality is different, so different parts of the standard will be relevant depending on what the municipality is interested in doing, and what resources it has available. The scenarios below are intended to help you decide what portions of this document will be most useful to you.
| Scenario Number | Scenario Name | What you should read |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A largely rural town with addresses recorded in written form or in simple spreadsheet format and an informal process for maintaining and sharing address information. |
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| 2 | Same as #1 but with a larger population and/or an urban center and a government with individual departments interested in managing addresses in software used for permitting or licensing activities. |
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| 3 | A larger town or city seeking greater efficiencies in managing, reconciling and sharing address information between departments. This scenario is especially relevant in municipalities interested in delivering services or interacting with citizens on a web site. A consistent, standardized approach to addressing can greatly enhance interaction with citizens. |
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| 4 | Same as #3, but for towns or cities with a significant urban area where unit-level addressing is common and where tracking address information to the building, floor, and unit level is important. | All Sections |
For any city or town using a GIS, the linking of addresses with mapping of parcels and structures (locally sourced or available from MassGIS) has the potential to improve planning and decision making and to streamline operations. In that case, the discussion of map-related issues and especially the discussion of community and municipal boundaries in Sections 3.5 and 3.12 will be of particular interest.
How can I get answers to specific questions or issues?
The staff at MassGIS has created a standardized listing and a map of over 3 million addresses in Massachusetts to support 911/emergency response. Staff at MassGIS will be happy to engage with any municipality that seeks to improve its addressing practices and/or can contribute to building and maintaining the statewide master address list. Email Massgismail@mass.gov, including “address issue” in the subject line, about any question related to this standard or any other address-related issue.
Introduction
This standard provides guidance for communities in Massachusetts on address assignment and address data management. It describes best practices for address assignment workflows and how to create address listings that are comprehensive, accurate, and useful.
This standard is issued by MassIT's MassGIS program under the authority of M.G.L Ch. 7D Sect. 5. It is an informational document and conformance with this standard is voluntary. It is based on national models and on the extensive experience acquired by the MassGIS program mapping a statewide address list for use in emergency response.
The intended audience is all municipalities, large and small, and the vendors that provide them with services and software, as well as the larger community of address users.
Addressing is a local responsibility and every city and town must deal with how and when streets must be named and address numbers assigned. Every municipality has the challenge of managing property records, responding to public safety emergencies, and delivering a variety of services to residents, all of which depend on use of addresses. But as noted in the preface, not all municipalities are alike – each has different capabilities and ambitions. For example, rural towns may not be too concerned with how to manage detailed “secondary” location information, such as building names or unit numbers.
1.1. Benefits of a Standard
Within municipalities, addresses are used by a variety of departments including assessing, clerk, treasurer/collector, public safety, public health, building inspections, and others. Addresses primarily serve to identify undeveloped parcels, structures, or units within a structure, although other kinds of locations may receive addresses.
- Best practices in address assignment ensure that municipal staff can quickly and easily find a given location. In particular, seconds count for public safety staff responding to an emergency call.
- A standardized address provides a precise, unique reference to structures and units. This improves the efficiency of tax collection, permitting, inspections, infrastructure maintenance, and other municipal functions.
- Standardized addresses can provide a link between records in different municipal departments. Implementation of this standard will support the centralization of IT resources and the deployment of enterprise-wide applications for use by different departments. For example, a building inspector could find out about any public safety concerns at a particular location before going there
In general, the public and businesses use addresses for the same purposes as local governments - for reference and identification, and to find a structure when they are not familiar with its location. High-quality addressing benefits the public as well as municipal employees.
1.2. Postal versus Situs Address
Most people, when they think of an address, think of a mailbox at the end of a driveway or in a building. In many cases, the distinction between a mail delivery end point and the actual location or situs address (defined more precisely below) is not too important. However, there are a number of circumstances where the difference can be problematic.
- Mail may be delivered to a US Post Office box, or to a central distribution point on a campus or other institution, rather than an actual address location. Post office boxes are obviously not valid situs addresses.
- Mail may be delivered to a location such as a cluster of mailboxes at the end of a private way, whose location relative to the actual structures being addressed is unclear. Additional detail, such as descriptions of building or unit locations, may not be used by the postal carrier but may be needed for service delivery to the actual residence or business location.
- Postal delivery areas, as reflected in the place name used for postal addressing, are not necessarily consistent with legally defined boundaries, nor are they stable. The place name or community name, as discussed below, is a very important part of a standardized address and community boundaries need to be mapped in order to establish jurisdiction and provide quality assurance for street address elements.
1.3. National Models and Sources
As it pertains to the format and content of address data, this standard is based on the following sources:
- the Presence Information Data Format - Location Object (PIDF-LO) specification from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),
- the United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, and Postal Address Data Standard from the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), and
- the NG9-1-1 Civic Location Data Exchange Format (CLDXF) from the National Emergency Numbering Association (NENA).
These three standards, by design, are largely consistent in how they define address elements and in having a required format for address data. They extend and improve on the US Postal Service standard for mailing address layout, known as Pub. 28, but are mostly compatible with it. This means that addressing stakeholders will not lose any investment they have made in cleaning up their mailing lists by moving to the state standard.
Two communities in Massachusetts, Dedham and Belmont, provided a template addressing standard which was used as a starting point for the best practices portions of this document.
1.4. Role of MassGIS
The MassGIS program has built, and is continuing to maintain and improve, a statewide address listing and a GIS map of address locations from various local and statewide sources. The overall goal of this effort is to provide a unique, standardized format and a corresponding point location for every valid address in the Commonwealth. This will facilitate the use of addresses in a GIS environment and specifically is being used to support routing of emergency calls (see Section 1.5 Public Safety Considerations below).
The completion of a statewide assessor parcel map in GIS provided an initial link between the structure(s) on a given parcel of land and the address recorded in the assessor database. Other sources of address information included voter registration and utility customer listings.
The maintenance of this master address list and associated mapping is a significant challenge, depending on address and mapping updates from municipalities, ongoing reconciliation with address listings from utilities including telcos and other sources, review of mapping from site managers and of plans filed with the registries of deeds, research online, and finally, extensive work in the field to resolve remaining uncertainties. No single source is comprehensive or reliable, so a “belt-and-suspenders” approach is necessary. Master address listings that conform to the content and format guidelines of this standard are available from MassGIS (details below); it is hoped that these listings will provide a foundation for cooperative maintenance of shared address data by municipalities willing to adopt the standards and best practices laid out in this document.
1.5. Public Safety Considerations
This standard is compatible with the basic requirements for street address assignment established in 560 CMR 2.00 Appendix A: State 911 Department Standards for Enhanced 9-1-1. It goes significantly beyond those legacy requirements in scope to incorporate relevant national standards governing the deployment of so-called Next Generation 9-1-1 technology. Having a complete list of all addresses and their geographic locations is a core requirement of the Next Generation 9-1-1 system, which uses address locations to determine how emergency calls should be routed.
Addressing is particularly important to emergency responders, who must find a given location as quickly as possible. Often, responders are intimately familiar with the streets and may even know all the individual house numbers. But even they can be confused by poor addressing practices, or may need to respond into a neighboring municipality in mutual aid situations. Where time is of the essence, addressing needs to follow simple and common-sense rules.
This standard does not deal with various measures related to emergency response such as requiring adequate signage on buildings, ensuring access to gated communities, or mandating sufficient width of driveways and access roads. It deals solely with the content and format of address data and how addresses should be assigned. But it does reflect the experience of first responders and dispatchers, and is intended to support the efficient delivery of emergency services.
1.6. Local Implementation of a Master Address File and Map
Often, cleaning up addressing is the first step in moving towards more efficient use of technology to support permitting, inspections, assessing, and other municipal operations. Adoption and implementation of a standard is a pre-requisite for combining address lists currently stored in separate locations into a single master address list. It is also a necessary step if communities want to link addresses to point locations.
The following steps, typical for communities wishing to adopt and implement an address standard, are outlined in more detail in Section 6.
- Identify and convene addressing stakeholders including representative from executive body. Identify a project lead to manage the process. Typical stakeholders are listed in Section 6.1.
- Identify inefficiencies and problems with current addressing and with address assignment workflows. Common problems are listed in Section 6.2.
- Establish goals in response to the problem statement. A common goal is to formally adopt an address standard, whether by incorporating it into bylaws or issuing by executive fiat.
- Develop a plan to improve addressing practices and data quality. Determine roles and responsibilities and allocate needed resources.
- Establish a governance structure with regular review of progress and iteration of the address improvement plan.
2. Content of this Document
This document presents standards and best practices that apply to all cities and towns. It is organized into topic areas with the intent of allowing municipalities to focus on those areas that concern them and implement the relevant portions of the standard. That said, every city and town will benefit from implementing those parts of the standard that relate to street address assignment and formatting. While much of this material will be new and some of it may be challenging, it reflects in-depth experience with the issues and problems encountered by all municipal staff who work with addressing. What follows is a summary of the remaining sections:
- Section 3 - Definitions provides the necessary background on addressing concepts and definitions of terms used throughout the standard. This section deserves careful reading, especially the formal definition of address and address community.
- Section 4 - Address Assignment deals with process - the operational aspects of address assignment including jurisdiction, street naming, address number assignment and sub-addressing. The standard presents best practices for address assignment going forward, while recognizing that many current addresses will remain non-conforming. Much of this material is common sense - addressing should be transparent and predictable to be useful, especially in emergencies.
- Section 5 - Address Record Format and Content is focused on the address records themselves. This section presents state-of-the-art best practice relative to formatting and content. The primary emphasis is on ensuring address data quality and usefulness in automated systems. The standard covers the familiar street address and also provides structure for managing sub-address elements such as buildings, units, and other kinds of locations.
- Section 6 - Suggested Implementation provides a menu of steps that communities can take in moving towards a more efficient and modernized approach to addressing.
3. Definitions
3.1. Street
Any highway, road, street, avenue, lane, private way, access driveway, or similar paved, gravel, or dirt thoroughfare that supports vehicular access. Obviously there are distinctions between all these terms, but naming and address number assignment may apply to any of them, so we are using the word “street” in the most general sense. Note that this is a more limited definition than the one for “thoroughfare” in the FGDC and CLDXF standards.
3.2. Full street name
The full street name is the full, official identifier for one or more street segments. The full street name is assigned locally and should be unique within a community (“community” is defined below). A route number should not be used as the street name if a more specific street name exists. Examples of street names: Market Street Extension, North Beacon Street, Avenue A, 14th Street.
3.3. Full street number
A single number, with optional prefix/suffix, or a range of such numbers, used to designate a location along a street, usually assigned in sequence. Formatting of a street number is discussed below. Examples of full street numbers: 10A, 22 1/2, 13-15.
3.4. Landmark
A landmark is a place or feature which is well known and recognized within a community, such that it may usefully be referenced by name alone rather than by street address. A single building may be a landmark; for example, “Arlington Town Hall” in Arlington or “The Bromfield School” in Harvard would be known to local residents by name and thus may be designated as landmark addresses. A site (see 3.7) may or may not be a landmark – the sole criterion is whether the site name is generally recognized and associated with an identified location.
3.5. Address community
The Master Street Address Guide (MSAG) is a listing by community of valid street names and address ranges, currently maintained within the 9-1-1 system by Verizon in concert with 9-1-1 liaisons and data managers in each municipality. In this system, the MSAG community is the place name part of the street address. It is in most cases identical to an official municipality. In some cases, however, a community is a neighborhood or village within a municipality; these sub-areas are used because of duplicate street names and address numbers within a municipality that would otherwise create confusion. For example, there are multiple addresses on Captain Jacs Road within the town of Barnstable that repeat in the communities of West Barnstable and Centerville. Ironically, these communities historically were separate villages until they got absorbed into the larger city or town, which is why there are duplicate street names.
The current 9-1-1 system is being replaced by one based on geographic locations, but the same community names (in this document, address community or simply community) are referenced in this standard and in building the statewide address listing.
Eleven municipalities in Massachusetts (listed in Table 1) are subdivided into address communities. One MSAG community, Devens, is a special case, in that it covers areas in three municipalities. The boundaries of all address communities have been mapped by MassGIS, following the official external boundaries of municipalities and adding the internal boundaries to match the Master Street Address Guide. Download the list of community names and the GIS file of community boundaries.