The Unlisted: people without an address (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Unlisted: people without an address (2020)

theguardian.com

21 pointsbookofjoe8 comments

I did RV life during covid for almost two years, and it became very apparent that the government is just not able to handle the kind of arrangement where you are constantly moving.

First of all, every state requires you to order a new drivers license within 30 days of moving. So now you’re breaking the law if you don’t order 12 licenses a year. Next, if the address is wrong, there go your voting rights. Don’t forget that if the IRS sends you a notice, or the state sends you a jury summons, you’ll never get it. Oh and also you need to update all bank addresses immediately, because of KYC AML laws. If you move states often, yeah you’re pretty much screwed.

It’s a rather sad state of affairs.

What needs to happen is the USPS needs to manage identity, preferably using wallets of some kind, like DID wallets. Then you could just log into USPS and tell them where you want your mail delivered.

Won’t happen though, because the government is too inept and has no incentive to make people’s lives easier. Maybe someday it’ll get better.

If you're fixed in one spot, you can use general delivery [1]. If you're mobile, pick a mail processor who will receive your mail and either scan and send PDFs to you or mail forward to you. It's about $20/month. You can even use the address for residency if the processor is in Florida or South Dakota (although an overnight stay is usually required as part of this process). The USPS will perform identity proofing for Login.gov [2], but it is still up to your state government to provide you with a state ID or driver's license. USPS will hold your mail for 30 days at a time, and forward it temporarily to another address for up to 1 year at a time, at no cost to you [3].

If you're moving every 30 days, why are you claiming residency in a state? Residency is usually where you spend at least 183 days out of the year (lots of nuance here! talk to a tax attorney, not tax advice). The requirement to update your state government credential address is when your permanent address has changed, not when you're traveling (in your case, in an RV across the country).

The government isn't inept, they just aren't optimizing for this edge case. USPS serves ~258.3M adults in the US, how many of those folks fall into a highly mobile transient category?

[1] https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-General-Delivery

[2] https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-...

[3] https://www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm

(all of my physical mail goes to a mail processor for $20/month, and that address is what gets handed out to everyone, including banks and the IRS)

Occasionally I consider that it might be fun to be a digital nomad for awhile, but I remember I hate paperwork much more than I like traveling lol.

I wasn't that extreme, but did move around a fair bit in England. Never bothered telling any government offices because I figured if they were so inept as to not account for this, they'd also be so inept as to never catch me. I wasn't disappointed.

The USPS could help, but they can't solve the entire problem alone. A lot of this complexity stems from our dual sovereignty system where state governments have the power to determine residency status and levy taxes on that basis. California, for example, has a long document with guidelines for determining whether someone is legally considered a "resident". If you're only present for "temporary or transitory" purposes then you can't register to vote and aren't subject to state taxes for income outside the state. But determining "temporary or transitory" status is a gray area for nomads: while the document lists a number of factors it's ultimately a judgement call by government officials. And the rules between states aren't consistent, so in theory someone could end up as not being a legal resident of any state, or of multiple states simultaneously.

https://www.ftb.ca.gov/file/personal/residency-status/

I always figured a low-cost/high-impact charity would be free PO boxes for the homeless. Then you have a fixed address you can put down for a job application, getting through that filter, and it can be used to bootstrap access to other social services (For example, Medicaid programs that require regular renewal-- where do they send the renewal form to someone without an address?)

In Germany, you must register your address. This requires a lease and a tenancy confirmation from the landlord. The registration is an important first step in anyone's bureaucratic life.

For reasons not worth going into, you can't register your address sometimes, like when you sublet a person's room without the landlord knowing. This creates a host of problems for immigrants who can't find a regular apartment or room in a flat share. This means that they can't apply for a residence permit, and lose a larger part of their paycheck to income tax prepayments, among other issues.

Basically, if you don't have a registered address, you are not a person. The local government does not recognize your existence as a resident.

I help people settle in Germany, and finding loopholes and workarounds for that problem is a significant part of my work.

This is sad to me. As someone who's done the nomadic thing (and loved it), I see the intense damage this does.

We aren't trees, we aren't designed to be fixed to one place. We are moving, locomotive creatures, we cannot get the best out of our time on this earth by sitting in one spot. Creating bureaucratic overhead to becoming mobile is a huge drain on people and a huge detriment to their potential over their expected lifetime.

We take for granted that someone lives in a prescribed place. We unwittingly mould our lives around the requirement without realizing that it is foisted upon us. Our minds are mutated, we subtlely become a different kind of creature altogether, one not in line with our form. It makes us less healthy.

It emerges from a conflicting interest between humans and the institutions that seek better, more uniform organization. Literally all of the negatives laid out from not having an address in this article are imposed, and so the benefits are benefits of compliance and not benefits due to some type of objrctively improved state. We should quit talking about how to get people addresses and start talking about how to get them the things they need without one. It's one thing for a place to have an address, that's perfectly acceptable. A person shouldn't have to have one to be able to participate civically or in commerce.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com