The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

The final chapter of The Address Book, “Homelessness,” explores the struggles facing unhoused people who lack a permanent address. Mask describes the advocacy of Sarah Golabek-Goldman, who was in her first year at Yale law school when she began researching homelessness. Golabek-Goldman’s conversations with New Haven’s unhoused population revealed that what they wanted most was a permanent address. Without a permanent address, many unhoused people struggle to obtain employment or access financial services that would help them change their status. Golabek-Goldman’s research uncovered an intense stigma against homelessness; the employers she spoke with frequently associated unhoused people with drug users, criminals, and people with mental illnesses.

Mask shows that many common ideas about homelessness are based on misconceptions. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania showed that only 10% of some shelter residents are chronically unhoused; the rest are only temporarily experiencing homelessness. Mask notes that many unhoused people have jobs; nevertheless, stigma against unhoused people leads to hiring discrimination from employers, preventing unhoused people from changing their status.

To address this problem, Golabek-Goldman advocates for banning employers from asking for an applicant’s address before extending a job offer. This would allow unhoused people to access job opportunities without the stigma of homelessness causing discrimination. The plan is inspired by a similar ban—successful in 13 states—banning questions about criminal history in the early stages of the application process.

The second activist in this chapter is Chris Hildrey, an architect and advocate living in London, a city where the very rich and very poor live in close proximity. Mask notes that in her own neighborhood, multi-million-pound homes sit next to state-subsidized public housing. Britain’s housing crisis is compounded by the number of luxury investment properties sitting empty across the city: In 2019, £53 billion worth of real estate was vacant.

Frustrated by the number of luxury investment properties sitting empty in London, Hildrey designed a system to assign unhoused people permanent addresses associated with vacant investment properties. Under Hildrey’s system, unhoused people would receive the address of an empty home, which they would then use as their address. Mail for these people could be addressed to the vacant properties, then forwarded by the postal service to shelters or to a designated address, such as a friend or family member’s house, for them to collect. Mask celebrates the “subversive nature” of the image of an unhoused person and a millionaire sharing an address in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Although the conclusion to The Address Book explores the future of addressing systems and technologies, it begins in early-20th-century Chicago. Mask compares two of the men responsible for modernizing Chicago: Daniel Burnham and Edward Brennan.

Burnham had designed the famous White City at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exhibition, and in 1906 city officials tasked him with creating a new plan for the city. Published in 1909, Burnham’s Plan of Chicago set the standard for imaginative city planning. Although many elements of the plan were not incorporated, Burnham received lasting recognition for his contributions to city planning, and is known as the founder of the City Beautiful urban renewal movement.

Contrasted to Burnham is Edward Brennan, a grocery deliveryman and bill collector who undertook reorganizing Chicago’s streets. The city had grown exponentially throughout the 19th century, and the streets were chaotic: Duplicate street names were found across the city, as were broken-link streets, streets with more than one name. Brennan’s work—completed unpaid during his summer vacations—helped to bring the growing city into the modern age. Mask argues that the class differences between the men can explain the disparity in their reputations: Burnham was a wealthy and prestigious eighth-generation American, while Brennan was a working-class member of an Irish-American family whose work focused on improving the lives of deliverymen like himself. She notes that Burnham had fled to the suburbs when Plan of Chicago was published, while Brennan lived in the city throughout his life.

Searching for Brennan’s modern-day equivalent leads Mask to the work of Chris Sheldrick, an Englishman whose experience organizing music festivals convinced him of the necessity of better addressing and mapping technologies. Sheldrick’s solution to the problem is what3words, a project dedicated to addressing every inch of the globe. The project divides the map of the world into 3m by 3m squares that are assigned an “address” of three words; the Eiffel Tower, for example, can be found at daunting.evolves.nappy. Addresses are accessible by individuals and agencies via the what3words website or app. Mask notes that similar projects are underway at Google and Facebook (now Meta).

While acknowledging the benefit of these technologies to people living in places without formal addresses, Mask expresses hesitation about giving the power of addressing to private companies. Mask notes that systems like what3words divide communities, rather than unite them: Your address has no connection to your neighbor’s, and you can’t determine it by asking anyone but the app. She suggests that the debates surrounding street names and addressing systems are evidence that people care deeply about their communities. The conclusion ends with a call to action, encouraging readers to consider the power of addresses and to remember that addressing is not a neutral act.