eli5 Why do house numbers skip digits?

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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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13 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are two reasons that this can happen.

The first is that each house actually crosses multiple lots. The city might make the lots 30 feet wide, but if they each cross over 2 or 3 lots, they essentially eat up those numbers.

The other reason is for mail delivery. Especially if you have a community mailbox that is used for multiple streets, you might avoid having the same number in use on both of those streets, as that can create some mail problems. I personally run into this, as my house is number X, and on the neighboring street that uses the same community mailbox there is also number X. We get each others mail all the time.

And finally, the last little bit of odd vs even numbers. There are some parts of the world where this isn’t the case, especially with historical numbering. If someone is going down a street, this allows them to easily identify the side of the street they’ll find their destination on.

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