Today’s dumb question is about tagging of housing developments. I’m not sure how US-centric this is, so a brief summary is that oftentimes developers will build a bunch of houses in a group (often spanning only two or three streets). Those houses will usually be similar in architecture and the group will have a name. (Usually, these developments will also have homeowners’ associations with bylaws restricting what people owning houses in the development can do with their houses.)
TIGER seems to have included the names for a number of these developments, and the import has them tagged as place=hamlet. Is that the best way to represent them? “Hamlet” makes me think of a remote, sparsely populated place, but these are almost always contained within suburbs, although they’re generally way below 1,000 inhabitants (one that I’ve mapped, Cedarwood Estates at http://osm.org/go/ZcIoqe60R-, has just 29 houses). I know a number of tags tend to have slightly different meanings in rural and urban contexts, and I can’t see anything else that would seem to work for this level of population grouping. I just want some feedback to make sure that this use is reasonable before I start applying it elsewhere. Would it be reasonable to put a way around the community and tag that? The boundaries are usually pretty easy to determine: the outer boundaries of the constituent houses, plus any obviously common areas (some developments have pools, workout centers, or the like).
Relatedly, rental communities (areas where a single company owns a number of buildings, often apartment buildings, and rents them out) have similar characteristics to housing developments (most notably, a name for the entire community). Would it be reasonable to tag them similarly?