[Tagging] How to tag apartments in a building that is multiuse

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:
> Like many large cities, we have apartments that are on the upper stories of
> multi-use buildings. The lower level(s) usually contain shops and business
> services.

This is nearly every single building in New York City, so I'm quite
familiar. This is a photo of the view from my apartment of buildings
build similarly to mine:

http://www.emacsen.net/view.jpg

The buildings there are wonderful illustrations of the complexity I
see here. On the ground (and basement) floor there are stores. The far
storefront is a bank, the middle is a  bakery, and the one closest (on
the far building) is a multi-story pharmacy.

Then you have some second story occupants- there's a school in one of
the buildings, for example.

Then the center (the tall part) are apartments, with the entrance in
the center. And there's a rooftop terrace of the third floor,
accessible by the apartment building. There really is no good OSM
representation of this kind of building.

> My thoughts are 1) tag the building as an apartment building, and just add
> the businesses and 2) add a node as an apartment, but I'm not sure how to
> tag it in that case.

I've struggled with this myself. Ultimately I think it depends on the
"main use" of the building. But in a building where it's part retail,
part school, part apartment- I think it's unclear. Even in buildings
where it's 4 stories of apartment, and one story of retail, I'd say
that it's unclear- so my advice is to simply tag the building as
building=yes, and then place POI nodes in the building.

Other OSM editors in NYC seem to be doing the same, since single use
buildings are so rare here.

As for how to tag an apartment, this is something I've struggled with
myself. Ultimately I added an address with a "name" (not housename).

Longer term, I think there are two easy solutions (and they're not exclusive):

1. We should have a POI "apartments"- that indicates apartment.

2. We could tag the building "multiuse" and find the term for "retail
on bottom, apartments on top", so a building would be tagged:

building=foo   - where foo is the term we come up with for that feature.

- Serge