Why are there so many hamlets in Salt Lake City?

In Salt Lake City there are quite a lot place=hamlet tags, which seems rare as they don’t look like an “isolated settlement” as described in the wiki.

See here with overpass:
http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/dnF
Or see with OpenPoiMap.
Related to this (SLC hamlets) I found this very weird tagging!

Earlier I discussed this hamlet-overflow (but in a different city) in one of my diary entries.

How do both cases compare?

At the time of using TIGER data, there was not a good ‘place=’ definition for US subdivisions and apartments, and they were assigned using hamlet tags. It’s not clear that TIGER even differentiated between them.

The preferred way to handle these in OSM is as a named landuse= polygon, although they can be changed to place=subdivision also. It seems that there is no convention to use place=apartments.

I noticed that too, Mark. I live in Salt Lake City. I changed quite a few of them to populated place. Many of these are historic names or not known locally at all. They should probably be removed altogether. I think they represent very little value.

This would be nice for a ‘mobile’ MapRoulette challenge. As you walk / bike / drive around, it would ask ‘Is this area locally known as X?’

That tag you linked to is very weird indeed!