Carmel-by-the-Sea Village

The one-square-mile village has no street addresses — or didn't, until October 2025, when the city council finally approved a numbering plan. Before that, businesses and cottages simply had names. The logic runs deep: Carmel incorporated in 1916 around a stated ambition to remain "primarily, essentially and predominantly a residential community," and its ordinances have enforced that ever since — no billboards, no franchised chain stores, buildings scaled to one or two stories. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, artists and writers arrived and stayed.