House numbers in USA + Canada

[Quiet Man]

In USA + Canada why are houses in a street or road not numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc.? Instead they seem to miss out a lot of numbers and jump from 1 to 8 to 14. Any ideas?

[dzug]

To allow for further houses to be built in between the ones there.

It's possible they may never be built - eg if one house (say no 6) has bought the land for 7 8 and 9 as well and built a bigger house than the land was originally subdivided for..

[spudqueen]

It's the same on my road here in England. It's a long road, about 3 miles long. It starts in one village, runs through countryside for a couple of miles then ends in my village. Back in the 1970's the road was renumbered with each building plot sized parcel of land being given a number. Where there are large houses which may take up two building plots there is a house number (or two) missing.

[SteveD]

In the USA, where cities are often built in a grid system, don't they tend to number houses per block? The result being that the numbers start again for each block (except for the first numbers).

Isn't this why, in American films and TV programmes, you sometimes see a house numbered 1025, for example, which does not mean that the house is the 1025th house in the street, but the 25th house in block 10?