When my wife and I were looking at houses, there was an odd detail that stuck with me. It had to do with a house we’d seen just north of Denver’s Chaffee Park neighborhood.
When we met our agent at the house, we expressed surprise that we were able to look at anything in Denver.
“Well, that’s the first thing to know,” she said. “We’re actually in unincorporated Adams County.”
We were confused, but saw that the listing she’d printed out confirmed as much: we were in Adams County, not Denver.
But then we noticed something else on the listing—the address.
If we were in Adams County, why did the listing have a Denver address?
I’m framing this as an engaging little mystery, but the truth is that once we lost the bidding war on that house, I forgot all about the weird city/county/address conflict.
It was years later before the question arose again. I was drafting a project narrative a few days ago when I ran up against a little factual stumble:
If this project was in an unincorporated part of El Paso County, then why was the address listed showing the city as “Colorado Springs”?
The Census.gov website provided—finally!—an answer: what I was seeing as an address was actually the “USPS address”—which can sometimes (often?!) have nothing to do with the actual municipal location of a home or business:
The Census Bureau recognizes that the Post Office “city” name associated with a particular ZIP Code in the mailing address for a residence may differ from the legal municipality or district in which the housing unit is actually located. In addition, the “city” name(s) used by the USPS to identify a specific ZIP Code or Post Office may not be the name that residents serviced by the Post Office consider themselves to reside in.
The buried lesson here is to be wary about that mailing address—sometimes recipients won’t consider themselves residents of the city listed!
Taylor Coe 