My school, and a lot of others around the district have disconnected buildings called portables that are actually very permanent (I don’t know if they are even technically portable, but they are named as such) and don’t move (as something like an RV would), if I find some, should I leave them as unlabeled or mark them as buildings?
There was a discussion recently on the tagging email list about a similar issue: How to tag a “manufactured house”. My impression is that this seems to be a type of construction seldom found outside the US. There are two tags that are for similar things: [
building=static_caravan
](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:building%3Dstatic_caravan) and [
building=container
](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:building%3Dcontainer) but those don’t really fit your situation. I don’t see any other options that make sense on the wiki page for the building tag. For the school that I mapped near my old house I simply punted and tagged them as
building=yes
.
There was a recent changeset discussion on this for a school building in the UK. Taking a rough guess at one of the respondents ages I’d estimate that the ‘portable’ building has been there 25-30 years or so. They certainly are a common feature in English schools, particularly to add one extra classroom instead of starting a complex building project. The technology is quite similar to that of ‘park homes’ - special portable buildings used as residences on what might be termed mobile home parks or trailer parks. These have a design lifetime of from 20-25 years.
It looks as though we could do with better tag names than portable or temporary because neither express the nature of the buildings. However, i don’t have a good idea of what to suggest.
I mark them as buildings, as they are there indefinitely. They are not as readily movable as, say, a mobile home.