Street Complete treats them as if they don’t, and as such do not ask for address information on them. This was raised a few years ago as an issue and as a Pull Request:
I would like to ask them to reconsider the decision, but first I want to validate that bungalows usually have addresses in most places in the world. Initially I asked this for the uk community, and between these three places I can see the following points:
Bungalows usually having addresses is probably not a UK-specific thing (hence this thread).
Lots of people don’t like dwellings being tagged as bungalows at all (and would rather they were tagged as detached/semi/terrace).
Sometimes people tag buildings on allotments as bungalows (are these dwellings without addresses? Or more like sheds?).
For reference, I’m defining a bungalow as a single-storey dwelling, which I think is universal - again, feedback on that is welcome.
Anyway, with the above said, are there any examples of unaddressed bungalows in regions that otherwise have addresses on their dwellings? And if not, is there another reason we shouldn’t ask for address information on bungalows? I plan on taking this and potentially asking again (nicely) if we can get bungalows added as addressable objects in streetcomplete
There are lots of single story single family houses in southern California called bungalows. Looking at the wiki that is a reasonable name for the building style. They definitely have postal/street addresses.
I will admit that I normally just tag them as building=detached rather than building=bungalow though.
Do you have any examples to hand of bungalows in the UK (or culturally similar countries) without (or that should not have) addresses? The only examples that come to mind are holiday chalets/lodges/caravans that aren’t individually addressed. Contrast that with mobile home parks where each unit is addressable as they’re all individual properties (albeit on a single site). Also the only addressable building on an allotment would be the site/society office; the plots may be numbered but they’re not addressable.
I do not and it’s surprising to me that there might be some somewhere.
I think there might be something lost in translation in previous conversations; Dacha, which are sort-of like summer houses in Russia and Eastern Europe, are dwellings on “allotments" - but these are much bigger than British allotments, which are about the size of an American double garage and certainly couldn’t fit a bungalow on them. I think the Eastern European type have addresses, too.
In the UK, even those probably have a UPRN. If you were to look up the UPRN on FindMyAddress (which obviously can’t be used for OSM), you’d find static caravans and even permanent beach huts with linked postal addresses.
So in Poland there are bungalows - single-storey dwellings - situated on allotments, which don’t have addresses? How do you navigate to them, is it a case of putting a pin on a map? Do other properties in the area have addresses? Do you have an example of such a place that’s currently mapped? Are these “Dacha" or something similar?
These questions come from the nerd in me, not skepticism. Of course StreetComplete shouldn’t ask for addresses of fields of unaddressed allotment bungalows
the situation is made more interesting by legal status - allotments are typically not really owned by their users, but right to use them can be sold (or at least are sold)
it is illegal to live in building in allotments, but some build houses there with full-year occupation (but as they legally do not exist, connecting to say sewage network is not doable). Some have sheds, some have kind-of summer cabins and so on.
I am less familiar with those, I think that those are more of a summer houses. Though vegetable farming often was also involved on account of chronic deficiencies of communism economy.
Looking through Dacha - Wikipedia there are similarities, but dachas seem to be larger and closer to house on house-to-shed spectrum.
Are there other examples of unaddressed bungalows in otherwise addressed parts of the world?
what’s so special about bungalows that they require separate discussion? Isn’t this the same as with other buildings, e.g. a two-storey house, or even a waste collection plant without a housenumber?
the “nohousenumber=yes” status by the way can change anytime. For example the waste collection facility I mentioned before, did not have a housenumber some years ago (and was listed as no-housenumber on the official city lists of such facilities, i.e. officially confirmed) but now apparently was assigned a number (it’s the 881, so you can imagine it was useful to assign a number, with such a long road).
StreetComplete doesn’t include bungalows as addressable entities and a PR to change this was rejected (some years ago now), so I opened this thread to try and understand better why that is.
As in, it was absolutely possible I just didn’t know something so instead of opening another issue/PR I thought it was better to crowdsource some knowledge.
From what I can tell, outside of this example in Poland, bungalows generally have addresses wherever other dwellings generally have addresses. But this thread isn’t very long so it’s absolutely possible this knowledge is still incomplete.
In Nederland, sometimes bungalows do have their own addresses, and sometimes they don’t. Reason: true houses looking like large bungalows are called bungalows and are mapped as building=bungalow, while most of the holiday park dwellings (usually built of wood) are also called bungalows and are mapped as building=bungalow. In holiday parks, sometimes each bungalow has its own postal address, while often the whole park has one official postal adrress with the bungalows only have local numbers, or in small parks, names.
Some mappers see the local numbering as part of the address (number addition), others want the address to be the official postal address, and put the sub-numbers or names in a separate tag, apart from the addr: space.
It’s a mess, but I think in many/most cases complete or partial address information is available and should be asked for.
In Germany “bungalow” is understood as a single storey residential building, be it big and solid or small and lighweight. As such bungalows may have adresses (when used as residential building) or not (when used for holiday or leisure purposes). The same seems to apply for other countries as well.
The wiki says
The generic tagging for a single-storey detached house is building=detached + building:levels=1
which applies to those bungalows being designed for residential purpose to my understanding. This leads to building=bungalow being the tag for those which are not residential houses. [1]
From that point of view I prefer SC NOT to ask for an address for a building=bungalow as this could lead to another load of unnecessary notes “Cannot answer if this building has a housenumber” or the like, for those bungalows which definitely do not have adresses.
[1] That doesn’t mean it will not be used for residential bungalows as well, which is the nature of OSM - it’s a mess, as @Peter_Elderson already said.
It’s not clear to me why it would be logical to reserve bungalows for holiday homes, and I don’t think that in practice this is how it’s used. At least in anglophone countries.
The wiki might be written aspirationally in this regard.
so instead of opening another issue/PR I thought it was better to crowdsource some knowledge.