OpenStreetMap

Apartment complex addresses

Posted by stragu on 30 October 2016 in English.

Recently, I have mostly been adding house addresses around my neighbourhood.

current focus on local addresses

One issue I am running into is that I can’t figure out the best way to set the address for an apartment complex.

I am currently trying to tag individual buildings with building=apartments, and an area that encloses all the buildings with the address tags (like addr:housenumber, addr:housename, addr:street).

current idea for an apartment complex address

However, I noticed that that does not end up being rendered in Mapnik. I am not trying to map for the renderer, but just thought that it is odd that the housenumber or the housename do not appear just like they would for an individual house, and therefore that I must be doing something wrong.

The OSM wiki is quite vague on the subject – would someone like to share their method?

Discussion

Comment from Glassman on 30 October 2016 at 15:37

I applaud you for adding addresses to buildings. Hopefully someday soon, every address will be in OSM.

My solution to apartment numbers is using a node with the address, including the unit number (addr:unit) inside of the building outline. The individual units will render - but only with the housenumber. Tag the building outline with the main address. Check out Parkpoint Condominiums that was done a while back.

[1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/47.67659/-122.26428&layers=N

Comment from alexkemp on 30 October 2016 at 17:48

Hello @stragu

Takes a long while to add addresses, doesn’t it? Well done for taking the time & trouble.

The wiki that you need to refer to is probably Tag:building=apartments#addressing

My suggestion is that you think of it in this manner:

  1. Address numbers are most commonly placed on a way, but this is a building way.
    Thus, for buildings which are a single number or a range of numbers (eg 6-14), draw the building, and place all addr:* tags into the building. The standard OSM map will display “housenumber housename” within the building outline.
  2. Alternatively, address numbers may be placed in a node. In general, the consideration is, I think, that this will be done to quickly place a large range of addresses which later will each be incorporated into a building way.
  3. A combination of the two above is used with apartments (flats, condominiums) where the entire apartment gets a building way, and the entrances are marked as nodes on the building outline (tag: entrance=*). The various addr:* tags can then be distributed between the building way & the entrance nodes.
  4. Finally, your situation of a complex of buildings as an apartment complex. For this, @Glassman’s is the perfect example: draw each building in the complex, marking up the addresses for each individual building in the normal way. Then, draw an area to mark the complex perimeter, placing landuse=residential + name=name-of-complex in the area.

HTH

Comment from alexkemp on 31 October 2016 at 20:41

More wiki links for you:-

This is the format that I’ve used across the last 7 months to map houses + house addresses, although I never knew until a few hours ago that it was known by this name. It uses addr:* tags; they are in the wiki here:-

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