Disadvantages and civil disabilities of itinerant people in the United States

This article covers the injustice of the disadvantages and civil disabilities that people who live an itinerant lifestyle face in the United States.

Background
A person's domicile or residence is a place where he/she lives. It is sometimes interpreted as a place where a person intends to live regularly at the present time. Other times it is interpreted to be a place where a person plans to reside permanently and for the future.

In the United States, some people live in such a way that they do not always reside at a permanent physical abode. This can be for various reasons:
 * Some people relocate to new housing on a frequent basis for reasons of cost, jobs, escaping domestic violence, or other factors.
 * Student attending higher education (at a college or a university) tend to be extremely mobile and need to move often between dormitories in campus housing, off-campus housing, and also between cities and states for internships and jobs.
 * Also, some people travel around in recreational vehicles (RVs) on a full-time basis; these people are known as "full-time RV'ers" or "full-timers" and may stop at various places around the United States and other countries to live for short periods of time. Full-time RV'ers sometimes do not own or rent any fixed property.
 * Homeless people also lack a permanent address and may stay in homeless shelters or in public places for periods of time.

In the United States, most fixed physical locations have postal addresses assigned by the United States Postal Service (USPS) and receive mail via the USPS. However, certain types of non-traditional housing including many college/university dormitories do not have addresses that can receive mail from the USPS. In colleges/universities, often the buildings are not even assigned street addresses and can only be referred to by the building name even when sending packages by other couriers such as United Parcel Service (UPS). Oftentimes, colleges and universities provide Post Office Boxes (P.O. boxes) to the students, and these P.O. boxes are the only way to receive mail.

Itinerant people, especially full-time RV'ers, often use the services of a mail forwarding agency as a substitute for a regular residential address to receive mail. These companies are able to provide custom services in receiving the mail and forwarding items to the customer on an ad-hoc basis at the customer's request. These services are officially classified as Commercial Mail Receiving Agency (CMRA) agencies by the USPS and are required to follow certain regulations. The customer typically uses his/her address at the mail forwarding service as a "virtual" contact address that is given out to other parties; this allows a more permanent fixed location at which the customer can receive mail. Customers often use the mail forwarding service as their domicile address, including for tax and voting purposes.

Description
Itinerant people, such as the aforementioned classes of people, face a number of disadvantages and civil disabilities in the United States. A civil disability is an incapacity for the full enjoyment of ordinary legal rights. (Black's Law Dictionary)

Banking
Itinerant people face civil disabilities in banking. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the USA Patriot Act was passed; this law contains provisions for Customer Identification Programs (CIPs) for financial institutions in order to attempt to prevent terrorism and money laundering. A Customer Identification Program (CIP) is a process of verifying a customer's identity that a bank or financial institution is required to perform before being legally permitted to open an account, such as a checking or savings account or a loan. The Patriot Act's CIP rules require that the bank collect a customer's physical address and use it as part of the verification process. The physical address cannot be a P.O. box; this is required under the theory that law enforcement should be able to "contact" a person at a physical location.

Banks are permitted by the Patriot Act to take a separate mailing address from a physical address, but are not required to provide customers with this flexibility. Therefore, often banks take a simpler route of requiring one address from the customer that must be able to receive mail. By doing this, banks force the customers to have a physical address that is served by the USPS. This can cause problems for students who live at dormitories that can't receive mail at the dormitory address. Sometimes, banks provide less flexibility for the address verification for online applications to open accounts than applications done in-person at branches.

Due to a desire to avoid liability under the Patriot Act, banks are increasingly rejecting people and closing existing accounts when people use a mail forwarding service (CMRA). In spite of people being able to use CMRAs for tax and voting purposes, financial institutions are interpreting the Patriot Act as prohibiting the use of CMRAs as the customer's physical address for the purpose of CIP verification. Banks are increasingly building and maintaining databases of the street addresses of known CMRAs, and cross-checking customers' addresses against these databases to "weed out" people who use CMRAs as their addresses with the bank. This creates a major problem for full-time RV'ers. In addition, the USPS online address lookup tool now contains a feature that explicitly tells whether the address is with a CMRA, based on CMRAs' requirement to register their status as CMRAs with the USPS. Essentially, itinerant people including the RV'ers are being branded as potential terrorists or money-launderers because of the fact that they don't have a traditional residential address that receives mail.

The Patriot Act contains an exception for using a next-of-kin's or friend's address when the customer himself/herself does not have an acceptable permanent physical address. However, this requires an itinerant person to be dependent on third parties (family members and friends), whom a person may not necessarily have or be able to rely on. Many full-time RV'ers and other types of itinerant people want the right to lead an independent life without being forced to rely on family and/or friends. In addition, using the address of a next-of-kin or friend often presents taxation issues when the next-of-kin or friend resides in a different state than the customer wants/needs to use as his/her residence state.

Financial institutions use credit reports to verify a person's physical address for CIP purposes. The address registered on credit reports come from various sources and will often be incorrect or out-of-date for itinerant people who move often. There is a process required for a person to manually update his/her address that appears on a credit report.

Financial institutions also sometimes reject applications for products such as loans, when the customer has not lived at his/her address for a certain length of time. This is known as a "stability" requirement, and itinerant people are at an extreme disadvantage in being able to meet stability requirements.

Homeless people, including homeless veterans of the armed forces, are often unable to receive government benefits such as Social Security / disability, due to not having a fixed permanent physical address. In addition, homeless people sometimes cannot have their funds released from banks due to not having an address and being unable to prove where they live.

Victims of domestic violence living in domestic violence shelters often need to open their own bank accounts in order to keep money securely, but because of the CIP regulations they are often barred from doing so. The locations of domestic violence shelters are often confidential, and the survivors residing in them are often required to maintain this confidentiality and are prohibited from disclosing the shelters' addresses, even to major banks for the purpose of account applications. This confidentiality is necessary for the safety and security of the shelter residents and staff. The CIP requirements essentially treat the domestic violence victims the same way as terrorists and money launderers just because they aren't able to disclose their physical addresses. Sometimes domestic violence shelters attempt to work with local banks to convince them that the shelters' business addresses should be usable as a "next of kin", but doing this is in a "gray area" similar to when people (such as full-time RV'ers) attempt to use Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRAs) as their addresses for CIP purposes, which is typically rejected. Domestic violence shelter residents are otherwise forced to rely on friends and family members for CIP purposes, which is often impossible when someone is in a domestic violence situation.

Voting
Itinerant people in the United States have often faced problems with voting in various jurisdictions.
 * Government officials and elected representatives have often tried to prevent students in higher education from exercising their right to vote in the state in which they attend school, claiming that the school location is not the students' permanent residence because the students are highly mobile and don't necessarily plan to stay beyond their time at the college/university. This opposition is often done with the premise that students should cast absentee or mail-in ballots at their "home" address that they came from before attending school. However, a problem with this view is that the USPS has a policy of refusing to forward election materials during a Change of Address (COA). Also, students often obtain driver's licenses and use the state in which they attend school as their abode for other reasons. When voting, people need to provide identification, and there is a problem when the state on a person's identification such as a driver's license does not match the state in which they are voting.
 * Homeless people have often been banned from voting because of the fact that they lack a permanent address. Litigation on this issue has produced court rulings that it is unlawful for boards of elections to require that people live in traditional housing, that the term "residence" should be broadly interpreted, and that homeless people must be permitted to describe any location (such as a park bench or homeless shelter) at which they reside for some period of time. This may still cause problems, however, as it technically requires that a person stay in one place for some period of time.
 * There have been cases in which people who undergo home foreclosures have been banned from voting because of voter caging, in which mass mailings are sent to people as "do not forward", and then any returned mail causes the voter to be challenged with the corresponding Board of Elections. This is often done by partisan groups.
 * Full-time RV'ers using CMRAs have been challenged as being invalid voters. This produced a court decision in Texas that held that people using CMRAs were permitted to vote using these addresses.

Motor vehicle registration and inspections
U.S. state laws about vehicle registrations and inspections largely fail to accommodate itinerant people and foreigners travelling in the U.S.

It is typically impossible for someone to register a car in the United States without having a permanent address to register with a certain state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). This presents a major problem for foreigners from outside of the United States who take extended vacations in the United States such as with the intention of going on a road trip.

Cars that are in certain states for more than certain periods of time are required to be registered in that state. Enforcement of this can vary. This presents costs and time burdens to itinerant people who travel between U.S. states. They may be required to pay significant fees and taxes for changing the state of registration. In addition, the insurance on the vehicle typically needs to be changed when the state of registration is changed, presenting additional burdens to the itinerant customer.

In addition, many states require that vehicles get inspected on a regular basis -- such as annually or biannually -- for emissions, safety, or other reasons. The inspection typically can only be done in the state that the vehicle is registered in because only car-inspection businesses in a respective state are certified and licensed to perform inspections for the state that those businesses are located in. This presents significant problems for people who travel interstate for long periods of time, as well as for people who need to leave their cars in other states for long periods of time (such as people with vacation homes in other states). These rules sometimes force people to "jump through hoops" with Departments of Motor Vehicles such as by having to un-register and re-register their vehicles repeatedly, having to put the vehicles in Planned Non-Operation (P.N.O.) status, etc.

Law enforcement targeting of out-of-state motorists
In the United States, vehicle license plates (a.k.a. "tags") identify the state in which a vehicle is registered. Law enforcement in any given state tends to target people with out-of-state license plates for traffic stops and other kinds of adverse law enforcement action, often in an effort to target tourists. This may be considered a violation of the right to interstate travel that has been interpreted in the U.S. Constitution.

Receiving of mail via the USPS
The USPS has a Change of Address (COA) process whereby people can request forwarding of their mail at one address to another address. However, this process has limitations. "Permanent" forwards are limited to 12 months. In 2006 the USPS changed the policy for temporary forwards to be limited to six (6) months, with an option to extend the forwarding for a second six-month period for a total of 12 months. There are significant delays in starting and stopping mail forwarding. There are many special rules such as that a person cannot request personal forwarding for mail received in his/her name at a business location.

There are many rules that certain kinds of mail cannot be forwarded. Mail marked as "do not forward" cannot be forwarded, which is at the discretion of the sender. Many types of "sensitive" materials sent by government agencies cannot be forwarded:
 * Election materials for voting cannot be forwarded.
 * Social Security Cards sent by the U.S. Social Security Administration cannot be forwarded, but can be sent to General Delivery (described below).

The USPS gives mailers that pay certain fees an enormous amount of control over what happens to mail they send when the intended recipient has forwarding in place, as well as a great deal of access to information about postal customers' forwarding addresses: Sometimes the sharing of recipients' forwarding addresses is desirable as it enables the customer's address to be automatically updated with businesses that the customer does business with so that mail won't keep going to the old address past the date the forwarding expires. However, sometimes postal customers, including itinerant people, do not want their forwarding addresses to be provided to mailers and third parties. Although temporary forwards are not part of the NCOA Database information that is made available for public lookup, a customer's forwarding address is probably still given to senders who actually send mail with the kinds of Ancillary Service Endorsements that cause forwarding address information to be given to the mailer (verification needed). The fact that the USPS disseminates customers' forwarding addresses in these ways, in a way, prevents the COA system from providing a truly "virtual" address, due to the lack of privacy. In addition, the substantial rules that the USPS has about refusing to forward many categories of mail, and the fact that the USPS gives the option to mailers to refuse to allow mailpieces to be forwarded, largely defeat the purpose of COA forwarding from the perspective of postal recipient customers. For this reason, in order for a person to receive all of his/her mail, he/she must be using a direct postal address without any forwarding, and must have all mailers updated on that address.
 * Mailers can use Ancillary Service Endorsements, which are instructions such as "Address Service Requested", "Electronic Service Requested", etc., to specify things like the mail may not be forwarded and instead shall be returned to the sender with information about the recipient's new address, or that the mail is to be forwarded but the USPS will give the sender the information about the recipient's new address, or that the mailpiece is to be discarded rather than forwarded, etc. Many types of these Ancillary Service Endorsements require special fees to be paid by the sender to the USPS. Many businesses that send mail choose to refuse to allow the mailpieces to be forwarded because they "expect" their recipient-customers to update their addresses directly with them.
 * In addition, the USPS makes all postal customers' forwarding addresses available for a fee to people and businesses who know the recipient's old address. This information is made available in the National Change of Address (NCOA) Database. The sharing works by the USPS licensing NCOA data to about 500 "data brokers" -- a.k.a. "commercial data processors -- for large fees; the USPS provides the updated file of Permanent COA data to the brokers on a weekly or a monthly basis. The brokers, in turn, sell the service to mailers to update addresses whenever the mailers know the old address.

In addtion, mail takes longer to reach the recipient when going through COA forwarding, as it requires special processing at certain USPS facilities.

Also, when financial institutions send mail with Ancillary Service Endorsements to a customer who has a COA forwarding in place, then when the financial institutions become notified of the address change, they will often report the new address to credit bureaus, causing the customer's new/forwarding address to appear on the customer's credit reports. This reporting of the new address is typically done automatically and without any notice to or consent from the customer. The new address on the credit reports can then be used for future credit report validation (see the section in this article about credit report validation), and is available to any vendor that obtains the person's credit report from that point on (e.g. when the customer applies for credit).

The USPS typically does not provide any kind of warning or notice to its postal customers who file for COA forwarding about the fact that mail will be returned based on Ancillary Service Endorsements, and about the fact that mailers will be notified of the new/forwarding address via Ancillary Service Endorsements and the NCOA database. People often file for COAs without knowing this, and are blindsided when they later find out that mailers have had mail returned for them, and that the mailers have been notified of the new/forwarding address and have updated the customer's address on file in the mailers' systems.

The USPS treats COAs as an "Undeliverable-As-Addressed" situation, meaning that the mail could not reach the intended recipient at the intended address (verification needed). The use of and support for Ancillary Service Endorsements is intended as a method to handle this "Undeliverable-As-Addressed" situation (verification needed). However, the fact that the USPS allows this treatment of mail forwarding as an "undeliverable" status clashes with the fact that people using the COA system typically want all of their mail to be forwarded and to be considered deliverable.

In summary, itinerant people who depend on mail forwarding via the Change of Address (COA) system are significantly disadvantaged by:
 * the fact that forwarding has long delays to start and stop (simply for the USPS to process the request),
 * the fact that forwarding is disallowed on many mailpieces by policies of mailers and of the USPS itself, and
 * the inherent delay in the mail's path from the sender to the recipient via forwarding.

The USPS has a process known as General Delivery in which a Post Office will hold mail for 30 days for pick-up by the recipient. A person can have mail forwarded to General Delivery, which can be useful in an itinerant situation when someone has moved out of or been displaced from his/her home, but this forwarding is also only allowed for 30 days and has the same starting/stopping delays as any other USPS forwarding (even when the mail is being held at the very same Post Office that serves the address from which the mail is being forwarded). Due to the starting delays in forwarding and the 30-day time limit, a person having mail forwarded to General Delivery will typically have about a one-to-two-week window in which to pick up the mail. A person receiving mail by General Delivery will not be explicitly notified by the Post Office when mail arrives, and they must check regularly with the Post Office for their mail. The 30-day time limit on forwarding to General Delivery is most likely to force people to rent a P.O. box.

The USPS has a process known as Vacation Hold in which mail to an address can be held at the Post Office for up to 30 days. This process is separate from forwarding and is typically useful when someone travels away from an address for a certain time and intends to receive the mail upon returning. Vacation Holds do not have the same delays for starting and stopping as does forwarding.

People who relocate / change addresses often are much more likely to have their mail arrive at the wrong place (such as old addresses) as well as fall into the wrong hands. This makes itinerant people more prone to identity theft.

Costs of changing addresses
Changing one's address can generate costs. Updating a driver's license to contain a new address typically costs a fee with the Department of Motor Vehicles. There is also a great deal of time that needs to be spent updating one's address with many agencies and companies.

When filing a COA with the USPS online as opposed to in-person at the post office, there is a $1 fee.

Attestations under penalty of perjury
Oftentimes, people who list their addresses on government forms -- including for voting, Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) registrations, government benefits, and many other things -- are required to attest that the information that they provide, including their address, is correct under penalty of perjury. Oftentimes, the requirement is specifically for a permanent physical address, and this must be attested to under penalty of perjury. Perjury means lying under oath. This requirement is a major problem for itinerant people and people without a fixed physical address, because they are required to list some kind of address for themselves even though they don't necessarily have a permanent one, and it is often ambiguous (a "gray area") whether whatever they list is considered to be a "lie". The forms requiring these attestations make the false assumption that every single person has a permanent physical address.

This threat of conviction for perjury is part of how students and homeless people have been dissuaded from voting by government officials and elected representatives.

Credit report validation
Oftentimes, people who perform certain kinds of business such as opening online accounts or dealing with account information by telephone -- including for things like banking and utilities -- must go through an identity validation process involving information on credit reports. This is also required in order for a person to obtain his/her own credit report itself. These credit-report-based validation processes often ask the user questions about their address history, such as what cities and street names the user is currently or has previously been associated with. This is relatively easy for people who have had stable addresses for long periods of time, but can be extremely challenging for itinerant people. This is because the address information on credit reports depends completely on what was reported to the credit bureau from various sources. People without clear present and past addresses may not be able to answer the credit-report identity-verification questions correctly and may thus fail to be able to do business.

The use of contact information for identity purposes
One of the primary cruxes of the disadvantages and civil disabilities that itinerant people face, is the flawed manner in which governments and businesses use personal contact information for the purpose of forming a person's identity. Contact information -- primarily addresses and telephone numbers -- are treated as being elements of a person's identity, and this usage is misplaced because of the fact that contact information is a variable rather than a constant thing in a person's life. People are fundamentally not tethered to addresses because they are capable of living in different places at different times and because they relocate. People are not tied to particular telephone numbers because telephone numbers can change.

Service of legal process
Itinerant people are at a large disadvantage in being able to fairly receive service of process in legal situations in which they are defendants in civil lawsuits. Plaintiffs in lawsuits are required to "serve" defendants so that the defendants officially have notice of the proceedings against them. Typically, a plaintiff is obligated to serve a defendant where the defendant is known to be or to reside. However, in many jurisdictions, a plaintiff's obligation to track down a defendant only extends so far. In some situations when a defendant is itinerant, a plaintiff only needs to serve the defendant at his/her last known address. It is often in the plaintiff's interest to serve the defendant such that the defendant does not actually physically receive the paperwork. When a defendant does not receive the paperwork, the case can often be challenged for "improper service", but such a challenge may not succeed for itinerant people who were not residing at their last-known address. This can often be a problem for people staying in hotels/motels.

If a defendant does not answer a lawsuit due to not having received the legal paperwork, a default judgment will typically be entered against the defendant. This default judgment must then be challenged after the fact, which is often much more difficult than having defended oneself in the lawsuit in the first place. 

Sometimes, when a potential defendant anticipates a potential lawsuit, he/she needs to give written notification in advance to the would-be plaintiff of where to serve the would-be defendant, in order for the plaintiff to be obligated to serve the defendant where the defendant is actually staying.

Bail in criminal proceedings
A person who is a defendant in a criminal trial may be much less likely to make bail -- i.e. he/she may be remanded in jail without bail -- when he/she is a traveller, itinerant, homeless, lacks an address, or is considered to lack ties to the community. In addition, even if a defendant in such a situation is approved for bail, the bail amount might be set much higher than someone who lives and has a permanent residential address in the community in which he/she is being charged. Even if a person lives regularly in the place in which he/she is being charged, lacking a specific permanent residential address may be treated by a court system as strongly presumptive of the person being a flight risk or lacking ties to the community.

A fictional example of this is in the T.V. series Law & Order episode "Over Here", in a courtroom scene (emphasis added):
 * Defense attorney: "My clients plead not guilty."
 * Judge: "People on bail?"
 * Prosecutor: "Defendants brutally beat two homeless men to death. One of the murders was clearly captured by a security camera.  Defendants have no ties to the community, no fixed address --"
 * Judge: "They do now! Remand across the board."  (Bangs gavel)

Prescription medications
Itinerant people in the U.S. who travel over large geographic distances are at a disadvantage in being able to fill prescription medications (drugs), especially controlled substances.

Prescription transfers
When a patient has a pharmacist run his/her prescription, or a doctor's office calls a prescription into a pharmacy, the prescription then typically needs to be processed and dispensed at that pharmacy, and refills need to be picked up at that pharmacy, unless changes are made. When a patient needs to pick a medication up at another pharmacy than the one at which he/she dropped off the prescription -- i.e., due to travelling to another location between dropping off and picking up the prescription, or a need to pick up refills in different locations than that at which the medication was originally dispensed -- the pharmacies must transfer the prescription which is an official process involving extra time and internal paperwork.

The rules regarding prescription transferring can be disadvantageous for itinerant people who need medication, because it makes it more difficult and time-consuming to pick up medications at different locations that they may travel to.

Controlled substances
In the United States, many prescription medications (drugs) are classified as controlled substances. (See "Controlled Substances Act".) These medications are under many complex restrictions and regulations for access by members of the public. A restriction that exists in many U.S. states is that controlled substances can only be prescribed by a physician who does business and is licensed in the same state as the pharmacy at which the patient attempts to obtain the medication. Controlled substances that a patient may regularly receive at one pharmacy in state "A" may not be transferred to an out-of-state pharmacy "B" in the state that the patient is visiting. This means that if someone travels interstate and needs a controlled substance or a refill of a controlled substance, depending on the state, the person must find a local doctor in the temporary state (the state in which the person is visiting) to write the prescription.

This can be very problematic because certain controlled substances, such as opioid analgesics (painkillers), often require an ongoing doctor-patient privilege and rapport involving trust for the treatment to continue. It can be quite difficult for a patient to have to find a new doctor in an unfamiliar setting out-of-town, and to convince that physician to write a prescription for a controlled substance on an ad-hoc basis.

Some states' rules provide some ability to prescribe controlled substances from out-of-state doctors, but there are often encumbrances: the out-of-state doctor might have to verbally authorize a short interim (e.g. 5-day) supply and then mail in the prescription for the remainder of a 30-day period, sometimes primarily because the out-of-state doctor won't be registered in the same state's electronic prescription network(s). The patient might still end up with the prescription they were looking for, but with greater hassle and more return visits to the pharmacy. Sometimes there are additional rules that the patient loses any "in-kind" refills on the medication on the pharmacy account after an interstate transfer to certain states.

Controlled substances are often limited in the dosage quantity that a patient can be given (a common example is 30 days worth of dosage), and in how many days in advance the prescription can be picked up (a common example is 3 days). This often prevents people from obtaining "vacation refills" of their controlled substances the same way that this can be done for non-controlled medications.

These regulations on controlled substances can cause significant problems for people who vacation interstate, go on work assignments interstate, RV full-time interstate, or are itinerant on an interstate basis for any other reason. It may be much more difficult for someone to obtain the medications that they need.

People who often return to the same locations in different states may find it beneficial to find and establish a doctor-patient relationship with analogous doctors for their medical conditions that require controlled substances to be provided. For example, if someone sees a pain clinic in city "C" in state "A" but often travels to city "D" in state "B" for work for extended periods of time, and if the person needs regular opioid analgesics from a pain management clinic in C, A, then he/she may wish to establish a patient relationship with a pain management clinic in D, B as well, so that the need can be served in both geographic locations that the patient frequents. The same can be said about doctors that the patient may need to be involved in the care.

For non-controlled-substance medications, it is typically easy for a doctor to prescribe to any location including any state, and it is typically easy to obtain a "vacation fill" in which a patient is given an amount of dosage in advance for an upcoming certain time period. However, the aforementioned general disadvantages regarding prescription medications still apply.

The use of a P.O. box as one's address
In nearly every situation, Post Office Boxes (P.O. boxes) themselves cannot be used as physical addresses because a person does not "live" or "reside" at a P.O. box. As a result, P.O. boxes are extremely limited in their usage for providing an address for identity purposes when required by government agencies and businesses. Due to the nature of how Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRAs) are required to register their status with the USPS, and that the USPS publicly reports the CMRA status for every address in the database, CMRAs now largely essentially suffer from the same limitations as P.O. boxes in their use as a physical address. In addition, it would almost certainly be impossible to use General Delivery as a physical address in any situation, because doing so would imply that one "lives" at the Post Office, and because General Delivery is not a "place" where someone can "live".

Shipping of goods from vendors
Sometimes, companies that ship goods to customers will refuse to ship them to certain kinds of addresses, such as dormitory addresses, campgrounds, and other types of non-traditional housing. This is based on some kind of implementation of a blacklist. Typically the issue will only become apparent once the customer attempts to check out when they are asked for a shipping address. Often the customer service agents of the vendors cannot provide any explanation as to why an address was rejected, and the customer has to continually keep trying different addresses or formats of the address until something works. Sometimes, as soon as an address does work, it becomes locked in and cannot be undone, which prevents the customer from testing out similar addresses that are not their own in an attempt to find out the root cause of the customer's own address being rejected. Couriers such as UPS and Fedex cannot deliver to P.O. boxes or General Delivery because those are specific to USPS, so those couriers need other types of addresses. With the policy of rejecting certain shipping addresses, companies put students, RV'ers, and other types of itinerant people at a great disadvantage in being able to order products from them.

In addition, vendor companies often botch a person's shipping address when the address has unusual categories of unit numbers such as "room" as opposed to "apartment" or "suite" -- for example, "456 University Avenue room 123". This puts students living in dormitory rooms, people living in hotels/motels, and people in other types of non-traditional housing, at a great disadvantage in being able to order products from these companies.

Failure to honor address changes
Sometimes, for various reasons, businesses and agencies fail to honor address changes of which a customer explicitly notifies them or puts on file with them. Sometimes this is due to clerical mishaps.

Some entities, especially banks and financial institutions, will deliberately send a "final" letter to the customer's old address after the customer has filed a new address with the institution, which purports to inform the customer -- typically for security purposes -- that his/her address on file has been changed. The banks and other entities that do this probably expect that, if the address change is genuine and valid, the letter sent to the obsolete address will be forwarded because the customer has probably filed a Change of Address (COA) with the USPS. However, it is not always the case that customers file a COA; sometimes they intend to simply inform all of their mailers of a new address manually. Continuing to send correspondence to the customer's old address can potentially leak sensitive information to a new occupant of that address. There are competing interests between wanting to ensure that customers are informed of any changes to their address on file that could potentially be fraudulent, and wanting to ensure that a customer is only receiving mail at an address at which they currently intend to.

Vagrancy laws
The United States and other countries have a history of vagrancy laws, which are laws that criminalize being homeless or not having a permanent residence. These laws have mostly been found unconstitutional by courts for being too vague, failing to provide notice of prohibited conduct, and for being status crimes (crimes relating to being something rather than doing something and punishing someone for circumstances beyond their control). These laws were used to control the "homeless problem" in many places. Nowadays, criminal charges that would have been for vagrancy are instead for similar crimes such as loitering.

Sex offender residency laws
In many U.S. states, sex offenders (i.e. people who were convicted of sex offenses or who pled guilty to sex offenses) are required to keep their residential addresses on file and updated with law enforcement; and in many cases are subjected to residency restrictions prohibiting them from living within certain distances of schools, school bus stops, playgrounds, or other locations where children tend to congregate. In many cases, sex offenders are required to actually reside in a permanent abode, and can be prosecuted for not doing so. However, the residency restrictions have often proven to be extremely prohibitive of the sex offenders living practically anywhere -- and the sex offenders have often been forced to become homeless, go "underground," and live in uninhabitable places such as underneath bridges. The fact that they are legally required to live in proper, permanent residences often clashes with the fact that they are forced into homelessness and itinerancy by the residency restrictions, and the sex offenders become needlessly further criminalized due to these circumstances that are beyond their actual control -- they often get arrested, charged, and convicted of things like "failing to maintain a residence" or unlawful vagrancy, when they are in fact unable to obtain a residence. Many law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. have recognized the problems with sex offender residency laws and restrictions, and have in fact argued and lobbied against these laws as a result. However, persecution of former sex offenders is largely viewed by many in society as being politically correct, and many people feel that sex offenders deserve whatever they get, even if they are being subjected to unjust laws like being forced into homelessness and simultaneously being criminalized for being homeless.

Keywords
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