I don’t think addr:place=* should be used at all in the mainland U.S., because the standard U.S. address format doesn’t distinguish between streets and places. They’re all considered to be the portion of the delivery address line that goes between the house number and unit number.[1] Sometimes, what looks like a street name might not be an actual street name.
Most of the 11,000 existing uses of addr:place=* in the U.S. are actually postal city names that should go in addr:city=*. Before iD introduced a field with the standard U.S. address format, some mappers incorrectly thought that a postal city should only go in addr:city=* if it names an incorporated city, or addr:place=* otherwise (such as for a town, village, or CDP).
The exception is Puerto Rico, where an urbanization is part of the standard address format, on the line above the house number and street name. These are being tagged as addr:place=*, though perhaps addr:quarter=* would be more harmonious with international usage. Even in Puerto Rico, if an address is associated with a public housing project but not a street, the project’s name is considered to be the street name.
In the cases I’m describing, both “Ruby and Opal” and “123 Ruby Street” are equally valid delivery address lines. The owner prefers the former while the USPS prefers the latter. I’m not describing the more common case where people might describe a location at a street corner for convenience, disregarding its actual address.
Typically, when a delivery point such as a building has multiple valid addresses, my advice has been to map the addresses as separate nodes within the same building. I suppose a shop that uses multiple addresses could similarly be mapped as an area with nodes inside it. But admittedly this approach doesn’t answer the question of how to tag the building or POI itself with its addresses.
The USPS considers the various words in a street name to be components in their own right, such as “North” or “Street”, but we don’t tag those separately in OSM. ↩︎