My brother lives at 35 Parson Lane, yet the next-door neighbor is at number 25. My last house was number 10, the next-door neighbor was at number 12. Why all the number skipping? Why not just go in numerical order starting with 1, then 2, etc.
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First, address numbers are odd on one side, even on the other (here in Chicago even are on North and West sides of streets, odd on South or East sides). This helps give context which side of street a building is on.
House numbering is determined on the local level and usually the range of address numbers extends from a single axis and get larger directional from there. Maybe it’s the center of the city, or the far SE point and from there numbers get larger as you get further. This way, the number gives context of location within the city. In the town I grew up, the houses on the southern border closest to the lakefront were smallest, and you’d see addresses like 2 or 10. As you headed west and north, numbers got bigger, into the 1000’s on the NW part of the town.
There may be reasons such as evenly spacing numbers within the address grid. If a section of road after one cross street starts with 100 addresses and the next cross street begins the 200 addresses, and the street between only has 10 houses, they want to evenly space them for better context — it’s more clear that 190 Reddit St is close to the second cross street vs. if the homes were 100 Reddit St, 102 Reddit St. up to 118 Reddit St. and then they jump to 200 Reddit St.
It also leaves room for adding homes, if for some reason there are infill lots that could be built upon, or homes get replaced with more dense housing, ie. tear down 3 cottages and build 6 townhouses.
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