> The United States is the world leader, with roughly ninety per cent of global capacity. [...] there are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined. Annual revenues are estimated to be more than forty billion dollars.
> I asked a Welsh facility manager I met in Las Vegas what his customers keep in their units, and he said, “It’s . . . it’s . . . rubbish.”
> My wife and I have a friend whose mother died in 2006. She and her siblings decided to sell their mother’s furniture and donate the proceeds to a charity that she would have approved of. “We put everything in storage temporarily, and it’s all still there,” our friend told me. She figures that they’ve spent at least fifty thousand dollars in rental fees so far—more than they could get from selling the furniture.
> She figures that they’ve spent at least fifty thousand dollars in rental fees so far—more than they could get from selling the furniture.
That probably doesn't even consider inflation, $1 in 2006 was worth $1.60 in today's money. People are really bad at long term financial planning but also get really attached to objects with some sentimental value. So this is a market where it's even easier to exploit that poor financial education.
Rather than just not paying and letting the owner auction off the contents, maybe you can tell the owner of the storage facility you'd be fine with them auctioning off the contents without ever going into debt?
My mother-in-law could have been a case study for this article too. A couple decades ago she was short on cash and long on wanderlust, and her kids were grown so she packed her stuff (mainly unexceptional furniture) into a storage unit, got a cheap 1 bedroom apartment in a new city and made a new life. A decade later, she decided to try in another new city, with another tiny apartment.
All the while paying for the storage unit, occasionally talking about the cherished "family heirlooms" therein; those things she'd bring out of storage when she got a bigger place. Especially a china cabinet she had to fight her sister for when her mother died.
Now she's having health problems and is approaching the end of her life. I'm sure she'll keep paying for the storage unit until the end but soon enough the day will come my wife and I have to travel several states away to empty the contents of the storage unit into a dumpster. Including the "beloved" china cabinet that her kids have already decided they have zero interest in (and probably smells of mildew and mouse urine at this point).
I don't know the total amount spent on the storage unit over the years but I've got to think it's in the 5 figures. Enough to pay for a car, or some nice trips, or ... to keep old bedframes in a big closet.
I'm in the midst of trying to decide on getting a storage unit or totally downsizing like this. To the point I was thinking of asking my landlord who they would use if a tenet died and left their rental property full of stuff just to see who I could call to make it all go a way. A one time fee vs monthly fees seems like a decent trade off to me.
We also happen to have an extremely serious homelessness problem, which is not relegated to CA.
Go to any warm state in the country and ride through the parking lots at night. If you are the observant type, you should see an astonishing number of folks living in their vehicles.
And home ownership is not only downward, but no longer part of the American dream for most people now. Storage facilities for many, are a place to lay down, or rent hope that things won't always be "this way".
We need to fix this. It's not just drugs and mental problems anymore.
It is very interesting that in many big cities in most places in the world, but especially Europe having a car while living in a big city is a big luxury while in the US homeless people have cars.
Cars are plentiful and cheap in America and can be had next to free in many cases. They will be in terrible shape, operated without insurance, registration and driven by someone without a license. They will also be gross polluters but won’t be taken off the street unless there are a series of criminal actions. Many states will only cite and not tow for lack of insurance or a valid license. The chance of getting pulled over is also quite low in many areas due to distribution of police resources. These vehicles are allowed to be parked and serve as shelters in many cities who choose to allow this as a tacit form of shelter. Just look at the transformation of the streets in Seattle, parts of the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and more. This is an ad hoc solution to a situation that can’t be addressed effectively.
It is not even the cost of the car, but the upkeep. In large European cities parking alone can be prohibitive. In Sweden cars older than 2006 pay extra tax because they don't have emissions testing data.
In the US car taxes are based on value. Where I live once a car is 10 years old the tax is $50/year. Buy a cheap car for $5000, pay $1000/year to insure it, and $50/year for a license and it is fully legal. You still have to pay for fuel, but that is fairly cheap. You also have maintenance expenses, but generally the poor have a network of mechanics to do the labor for free (in exchange for your labor for something else). Even if you buy a different car every year, you will be hard pressed to find an apartment for $6000/year.
Downtown in US cities parking is prohibitive, but that is only a small part of the city. Most of the city you can park for free. You want to move the car every day just so it doesn't look abandoned, but otherwise this is a cheap way to live and you get transportation as a bonus.
In Sweden large cities even in the suburbs parking can be quite expensive. But I guess it is because "the big city suburbs" in Sweden are still mostly 4-6 story tall apartments.
That tax I mentioned before makes very old beat-up cars not worth keeping.
One of the main upsides of living in a house in Sweden is not having to pay for parking. But even so the increase heating bills in winter can easily cost more than a car installment depending on your HVAC and insulation.
My 25-year-old car gets 30+ miles to the gallon, far better than an F-series truck, which is the best selling vehicle in the US.
It's been 30 years since anyone sold a new carbureted production car in the US, and for just as long cars have had OBDII, and it's been 50 years since cars were sold without catalytic converters.
There was a time, immediately after those technologies were developed, when older cars polluted significantly more than newer cars, but modern engine designs have been around long enough that cars old enough to be big polluters are expensive collectors pieces.
There may be an occasional car with a blown head gasket or piston ring polluting excessively, but they won't run for long in that condition. Thanks to CAFE standards limiting the availability of smaller vehicles in the US, the average 20-to-30-year-old gasoline engine probably pollutes less per mile than the average 0-to-5-year-old gasoline engine.
Not really. While it's true that CAFE standards have lead to bigger vehicles, average to average, the newer vehicle pollutes less. Yes if you compare a 2001 Honda Civic to a 2024 Chevy Suburban, the Honda wins, but 20-30 years old puts you around the year 2000, during which the pollution standards on cars was much more lax than they are today.
"Cars are plentiful and cheap in America and can be had next to free in many cases." What is the buzzword bingo and what is my bent?
I think it should be permissible to allow some dude to live out of a 2002 Town and Country that parks at a revolving series of strip mall. I currently work with several people who use a similar method to keep themselves and their kids off the streets.
The phrasing might be bad in that I was pointing out the overall bleakness of the overall situation; no insurance, no registration, no maintenance, but the intent was to show that they are teetering on the brink of falling into an abyss that is very difficult to come out of, not that they were some sort of anonymous nebulous mass.
The main thing I have been struggling with personally with working with this issue (housing, addiction) over 25 years is that it is such a huge, seemingly unsolvable problem that no one is able to address systematically and when I think about the big picture I feel overwhelming helplessness, but find hope working in much more local situations.
The car comment was just an observation to the parent comment, with some additional commentary on how it isn't at all a big luxury, rather a bleak situation where the car owner is in a very precarious situation. Reading it now, I do see how it could be misconstrued as some sort of zealotry of people of a certain bent, but I think I am might be bent the opposite way of what you think!
>"Cars are plentiful and cheap in America and can be had next to free in many cases." What is the buzzword bingo and what is my bent?
The entire sentence after that came across like a giant dog whistle for the kind of people who are never out of arms reach of their clutching pearls. The only word you missed was "blight". I was expecting it to be followed by a call for some sort of government action.
Might just be a reflection of the language of whoever your social circle is but it came across real Karen-ey
Interesting and useful. I would welcome societal action and have no faith the government can do anything at all given the government has no idea what to act on. I have seen the “government” wage a war on drugs, allow encampments to sprawl only to bulldoze them later, allow cars and RVs to serve as ad hoc housing only to tow them away, provide injection sites only to close them down, etc. Whatever the government does it reverses itself and we can’t seem to make progress.
I’ll use the word though; our inability to provide housing and basic essential services to our fellow human beings is a blight.
I assure you we have plenty of homeless people without cars.
When people are falling into homelessness, they keep the car for longer because (a) it generates income, either directly through something like Uber or by getting you to a job on time, (b) lower cost of ownership and (c) it serves as shelter in a pinch.
Many areas make it difficult to build housing, especially small units with low market rates, so living in your car is a much cheaper option. It's a secure area to sleep and house belongings, and while most jurisdictions limit parking in one spot to 36 hours, cars are easy to move, and the limits are rarely enforced, and usually with a warning first.
The solution is deregulation and land-value taxes. Tax land so that it reaches its maximum utilization. Deregulate so that buildings can actually be built.
Of course the storage unit living has been romanticized in literature too, I recall the unit in Snow Crash being a whopping 600 square feet. A palace compared to the reality of storage unit and car living today.
Illegal and in reality would only last a few hours into the night before security calls the police and you get trespassed. It's been romanticized but people have tried it and they didn't fare well.
As someone who has worked directly with these people in Los Angeles and Seattle, I tend to focus locally, otherwise the enormity of the situation is overwhelming and fills me with despair.
When you say “we need to fix this” no one can agree what “this” is. There is no one “this” and it becomes a morass of generational systemic issues, localized problems, competing views on economics, morality, government and more. It reminds me of when tech people show up to “fix” education. It just isn’t a single issue.
I agree we need to fix something, but as soon as I think about the big picture it feels futile and I have been involved in efforts for decades.
>I agree we need to fix something, but as soon as I think about the big picture it feels....
Yes, "fix" is a weaselly word, and 'futility' might be more appropriate if the subject has similar etiology to many of our other problems here.
At minimum, tolerance is due to the ones not causing significant problems. In my opinion, a substantial portion of the US will experience homelessness in the near future, but that won't discuss well around here. And note, I am from Florida. The East Coast version is quite different, as well as most of the median state situation. Very different. Especially in places where drugs are not the impetus.
With your experience in this space, are you able to provide some pointers for how to get involved in a productive manner?
The housing problem feels so daunting that I struggle to understand how one could help move the needle. Knowing which organizations to volunteer with or places to donate that actually improve the situation would be a helpful start.
When I lived in downtown Los Angeles, I volunteered at the Midnight Mission and various veterans organizations dealing with addiction and homelessness.
Only you can really define what is productive to you, but people are always needed for running the shelters, working in the kitchens and more. It isn't glamorous at all.
People need to be transported from one facility to another, to medical appointments, to court, to counseling and more.
I currently work with youth at risk, helping them finish their high school degrees and families who are right at the brink of falling into serious problems.
I can't really tell you which organizations to volunteer, as there is a spectrum of them; some are religious like the Salvation Army and some have social and political agendas that may not align with you. Without recommending or condemning, for example, you will find organizations who work with pregnant teens who are anti-abortion. This may not be for you. The same goes for sexual and gender identity issues.
One thing that seems very unpolitical to me, and it is how I started, was volunteering at a local shelter. If you have more affinity with helping women, there are shelters that deal with them. If you have more affinity with dealing with people with addiction issues, there are shelters dealing with them.
Because of my background in the military, education and addiction, I find affinity working with veterans, addicts and at risk youth.
The problem is daunting, and the needle feels unmovable most of the time. In the big scheme of things I feel powerless, but I know reducing local misery is possible and is something I can help with.
> There’s probably a fifth D: the delusion that your children will want the items you’re planning to bequeath to them, especially the kind of furniture that used to be called antiques
I'm at the age where a lot of friends are starting to deal with parents passing away, and it is very stressful for the next-of-kin to not only have to deal with the grief of loss, but then have to figure out what to do with houses and storage units full of junk. Some attempt to pick through the crap to find the 0.1% with legit sentimental value, others have more energy and try to do yard sales / estate sales, but most just call the truck and haul everything to the dump.
I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china" and 1970s era stereo equipment. If you want to pass on something to your children they will appreciate, pass them a cleaned-out home or pre-arrange a junk hauler.
I bought a Scott tube amplifier at a yard sale for $2 and sold it on Craigslist the same day for $40. At least I found someone who wanted to restore it or harvest parts instead of trashing it.
If they are sufficiently adult. Just ask them now do they want it. I can manage to pick stuff I want and then later dispose if I made mistake. If all children refuse just get rid off it already.
Kinda legit: Most people who lived through the Great Depression learned a "never throw any possibly-useful thing away" ethos as a survival skill. And they often taught that to their own children. And stuff became obsolete far more slowly back then, and furniture repair was a normal things, and ...
More commonly - "leave it to my children" is an excellent self-delusion...er, I mean psychological dodge, if you don't want to deal with the physical work, time required, or mental grief of proper sorting and disposal. But note that the "mental grief" may not be internal to the person deciding to procrastinate. If some of their family really don't get along with each other, then paying rent to put off the angry family drama may be their least-bad option.
When my sister died five years ago, her best friend, who was local and I wasn't, was a huge help to me in getting her house cleaned out. While neither my sister nor I have kids, my sister's two best friends do have kids who were her effective nieces and nephews. So we offered the kids anything they wanted that I didn't want (which wasn't much - just family stuff) and they took a surprising amount of it. Most of it was more modern furniture in good shape, which I didn't want. I got the antiques. One of the nieces wanted the very old china and crystal. So it is possible to get rid of a house full of things without trashing it all, but it can take time and that's not always practical.
There is the problem: the people who need your old stuff are rarely your heirs. You are still using your perfectly good furniture when your kids (and grandkids) first move out on their own and so you can't give it up to them unless you buy all new. Then you die (downside, go to a nursing home...) and no longer need it - there are lots of people who need/want your old stuff (at least some of it), but good luck finding them.
It is a logistic problem at some level. A bunch of my parent's and sister's stuff went to Habitat ReStore or Goodwill. We have an architectural salvage place nearby that takes some things (like light fixtures) that the others don't.
I have all sorts of “stuff” I would give away to someone who can use it. I just don’t want to spend 3 hours per object doing so via posting on Facebook marketplace, having 8 people flake out on pickup, and a Saturday afternoon killed because I need to wait around for someone to show up.
It gets worse with more esoteric things like nerdy electronic gear which is absolutely worth something to the right person, but that person happening to be in my area and also searching for that particular bit and bob at that exact moment are almost nothing. Some of these things can be hundreds of dollars if you need to order new or off eBay.
I’d be fine with giving it away to a reseller if I could. Just very difficult to throw it away since it’s so wasteful.
I don't see it getting more efficient than taking a picture of your stuff, and putting up a post on Facebook telling everyone it's free at x date and y address.
Maybe inheritance will have to start jumping generations due to how people die older and older. Nobody needs any inheritance anymore when they are 60 years old or more, unless they want to use it as blackmail to control their own children.
Woah woah woah - don’t lump 1970s era stereo equipment in with that. If any of these friends have vintage Pioneer (SX-##50/80) that’s “junk” to them, I could take it off their hands ;)
I've got a QX-949. It certainly has a sound to it and it is lacking in neither gravity nor power. I know what it is and when the time is right, I'll take the time to sell it to the right buyer. But the 949, despite its enormity, is small enough that I can drop it off at the UPS Store and have them pack it up for me and guarantee intact delivery.
But that's just one sale on eBay for a thing that I know well, and that relates to an interest that I have.
Maintaining many sales on eBay is hard work, and maintaining many sales on eBay for stuff you're just trying to get rid of is a mountain of work.
And quite frustratingly, it's easy to find people who have strong opinions about other people's junk.
A house I bought once came with apartments upstairs, and one of them included a General Motors-designed fridge from the 1950s or 60s.
It worked well and the hardware was in good shape. It was free of meaningful rust. It was quiet. It would've been a great and simple restoration project for the right person, and some boomer might have eventually been very happy with paying quite a lot to have it softly purring away in their nostalgia cave.
I didn't want it at all. It was in the way of the process of turning the cheap clapped-out house I'd bought into a place where my family could live. It was just junk to me; vintage refrigerators aren't my bag.
And everyone who came by and saw it went through the same sequence: First, they admired it as an odd and somewhat beautiful anachronism. Then, they asked if it still worked, and opened the door and poked around with a melancholy sense of astonishment.
After that, unilaterally, they came the same revelation: "Well, you can't just get rid of it! That's worth a lot of money!"
Fine, whatever: If they think it's worth money, then they can certainly have some of it. I'd first offer to have them sell it and broker the deal, so we'd both make some cash from what was obviously something worth selling. "Go ahead and sell it," I'd say. "You want a 60/40 split? How does 80/20 sound? Let's chat."
Nobody took that deal. It was too much work for them to conceive of actually doing it.
And then, I'd offer to let them just have it, on the condition that it simply disappear and that it never be returned to me again. After all: If it's worth so much money, then it's a great bargain at the low, low cost of free. For a long time, nobody took that deal, either: This was also too much work.
---
Eventually, a couple of gristly dudes of indeterminate age came and hauled it down the stairs and into the bed of their pickup truck.
They didn't pay a dime for it, and they didn't scratch up the walls or those steep, tall stairs in any meaningful way.
They sold it for scrap, I'm sure, and it probably got turned into new Chevrolets or something... and I just don't care. The important part was that it finally disappeared and was never seen by me again.
I was very happy that someone finally took the deal. But that deal took years.
One man's trash may in fact be another man's treasure, but getting those two men into the same room at the same time can approach impossibility.
> but getting those two men into the same room at the same time can approach impossibility.
Yeah, you said it. I've also got a QX-949, but luckily no vintage refrigerators.
As much as the over-built, last-a-lifetime quality is a big component of owning of these old appliances, I can imagine how that fades when it's an object that weighs 800 pounds instead of 80.
Well this reply is quite late, but in case you do end up seeing it - I’m not an expert on restoring them, but my understanding is the LEDs are generally the way, and if you’re capable, there’s a real premium paid for restored units.
The lights are generally not reliable on the 949 - particularly the radar display on the front-left (vumeter per channel, basically), so that’s also worth a service, if you can.
After that it’s the caps, as you probably know. The thing is with the quad ones, there’s literally two of everything in there.
Yes, but all the more reason to preserve it if you have it. There is survivorship bias in thinking that all older furniture is good, but I am thinking about old furniture that has lasted well.
> where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china"
My parents are still convinced I should keep the china set they gifted us for our wedding decades ago, because "What are you going to do if your boss comes over for dinner??". It's never been used.
Surely you ordinarily cook up at least once nice meal a week; eat it using the nice dinner service and bring a little elegance to your life (and who cares if you break a plate or two, it died doing what it was made for).
> I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture
Are you genuinely asking where they get this idea? People are getting downvoted for giving plausible answers.
The simple one is they appreciated getting it from their parents. It's only very recent that everyone has a surplus of everything, including the parents themselves.
I'm kind of glad my parents didn't just throw a lot of stuff away.
I question whether that's the dominant assumption. I know there's hoarders, but there's also loads of "stuff" associated with day-to-day life. Live in one place and you'll have boxes of bandages and aspirin, tools for fixing the lawn mower, a small compressor for blowing out your sprinklers, board games, extra coffee mugs, shoes that are ok but you don't like very much, on and on. None of that "junk", even if you might use it rarely and certainly won't perish without it.
There's little nobility in throwing out your fourth set of perfectly serviceable bed sheets or the nicked pair of nail clippers in the guest bathroom. Which leads to accumulation, like moss on a tree.
I agree a lot with this. Some folks really do hoard pointless things, but for most people a lot of their stuff really consists of things you'd expect to be in a household, but rarely use. It doesn't usually make sense to get rid of these things pre-emptively because you're still likely to use them as long as you're in that living situation, even if it's infrequent.
Then when you pass away and other people have to go through it all, they don't need those items because their household already has those items. I don't need 3 more flashlights and a kitchen table because I already have my own!
> I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china" and 1970s era stereo equipment.
Nobody has that idea. People want to hold on to all their stuff, and they would bring it with them in death if they could. But since you can only travel with very light luggage from this world to the next, they tell a nice sounding lie that they're keeping and amassing stuff and wealth for their children when they die.
If they really wanted to help their children, they would do it while still alive.
My parents (born in the late 30s-late 40s) just moved from a 5 bedroom house larger than my own into a 2 bedroom retirement apartment.
The house sold more quickly than expected, so they were in a panic to move out.
They're not hoarders -- in fact, the house was always impeccably tidy, and not at all cluttered.
They had to get rid of SO much stuff. My dad was an only child, so he had kept so much stuff from his father before him. My mom was one of many, but the eldest, and the family archivist, so she has the photos and old movies and stuff.
Ultimately the biggest problem is their children (my sister and I) DON'T NEED THEIR STUFF. We're adults in our 40s and 50s. We have houses of our own, filled with furniture of our own. Smaller houses than our parents', smaller garages, already more cluttered than our parents'.
Yes, we took on some keepsakes we love, we took on some furniture to upgrade our own. But mostly, there just isn't room. I don't have room for 2 generations' worth of accumulated tools, no matter how handy they may be. I don't have a house full of empty walls waiting for artwork and pictures. We're already storing heirloom china from my wife's side of the family that we haven't touched in the 10 years we've had it, we don't need to store another set of heirloom dishes we'll never use at dinner parties we'll never hold.
As generations get spaced further and further apart, the heirs no longer need stuff to start lives of their own. As property gets more expensive, our homes get smaller, so we wouldn't even be able to use all the stuff if our homes were empty!
Oh, man. It's getting to that time where I can see downsizing my parents' stuff as being on the horizon.
There's so much of it that is unremarkable. It fits into their house+garage, but it consumes a great abundance of space. There are, IIRC, 3 generations of China, each with its own China cabinet -- and I wouldn't know which dead person they once belonged to anyway. Tools. Furniture. Stacks of rough-sawn hardwood lumber, and logs.
I have enough furniture. I don't need rolling toolboxes full of mixed hoarded socketry, unsorted wrenches, and rusty tap-and-die sets in inch-standard sizes. The bench-mounted belt sander my dad made from scrap 40 years ago is cool and all, but it's been over 25 years since he's bothered to have it set up, it was always finicky to get running true, I've never suffered for a lack of using it.
If I ever move stuff like the tools and the lumber, I want it to be the very last time it ever happens -- and then I never want to see it again.
The China is particularly daunting: For as long as that stuff has been sitting around on display at their house, it has been both too nice to ever use and also too good to get rid of. (If the time ever comes that I want my own set of nice China for whatever reason I might, then: It's easy to get.)
I will work hard to dissuade anyone else from taking anything that is physically big, just on the basis that nobody needs that kind of curse in their life.
But I fear that others will find that a lot of this stuff will be too emotionally-precious to depart with. It will then be "temporarily" relegated to a storage facility until enough years go by that someone finally gets sick of paying the bill and it all gets sold to the highest bidder, thrown away, or donated anyway.
That expensive trip through purgatory seems like such a waste of money and effort.
My parents found one familiar, in particular, that wanted a huge (and extremely nice) china cabinet. After moving that, they put claim on more and more things. Great! Some neighbors also helped take things off their hands -- it would be great if they had a use for it, but I half think they were just taking things to be nice and help my parents; either to sell or dispose of later, which is also kind.
I'm so thankful that, in addition to making the smart move to move to a retirement home before it's too late, they also did the hard work of downsizing rather than leaving my sister and I with this chore a dozen years in the future. None of us have ever had a storage unit, although my parents just took on a "temporary"; I think 8x10ft unit. I know 2 things in there are for me, I just couldn't haul them in the one car trip I had time for. (and, unrelated, I'm living in a small apartment during construction on my house, so I don't have the space for a few more months).
I _do_ suspect that temporary storage unit will become relatively permanent, which is honestly probably the least-bad solution here. On the other hand, my parents are frugal and have lots of time on their hands, and probably opposed to storage units on principle, so we'll see :)
Personally I have an almost neurotic aversion to recurring monthly payments. I'll cancel a $6/mo Netflix subscription if I feel it's not being used, and start it up again later when there's something I want to watch.
I also hate junk. If anything I own doesn't get used for more than a year, I'll sell it or trash it (with a few exceptions).
So the even the thought of paying a monthly fee to store junk gives me real anxiety.
I am sorry but your logic of "trashing what's not used for a year" is extremely wrong. There are way too many exceptions. Examples are critical medicines, emergency food and other products, weapons, that are good to store indefinitely or until real expiration. Medicines can actually become useful at times and they easily last several years after the official expiration. Other examples are certain expensive electronic gadgets that are needed sometimes for diagnostic purposes, rarely, but absolutely. Books are examples too.
Yes, one should donate/dispose what's never going to be needed, but the criteria have to be more discerning than a simple timeframe.
I would say I struggle with cables and USB chargers and such. Like after years of being involved with tech I have multiple VGA and DVI cables that I hardly ever use unless I am messing with some weird SBC.
Sometimes I go through and throw a lot of stuff out. We have a reuse center in town where you can get that sort of cable for $2 so it is not like you have to pay Best Buy prices
Organizing can help. When you put all your VGA cables in place you realize you probably don't need 15 but the 4 best ones are fine (which you also won't use but hey progress).
I'm still hoarding IDE cables but at least not a excessive ammount.
I often think about this while watching Hoarders, and this is hitting similar neurons so if you'll forgive the off-topic-ish nature...
I think more than anything this is the ooze you get out of the sides of societies that focus so terribly much on consumer culture. Advertising nowadays is absolutely incredible at driving the creation of what feels like "needs" in people. In my thirties I started transitioning to a woman, full time, and as a result I've bought and donated shit tons of clothes. This experience has made me realize how bizarrely attached I am to those clothes, and also to so many other things I own that I wouldn't have remotely called sentimental. Yet between growing up in a heavily consumerist society, and my environmental side, I feel so much regret and shame when simply throwing things away. Worthless things. Things my rational mind knows damn well I have no use for, that have no reason to exist in my home.
Mind you I'm someone who is familiar with facing down my inner demons. I can't fathom trying to deal with this if you're not someone like me who has gone to lengths to educate myself, to get therapy, and not only gone those lengths but had the resources to do so!
Then I watch hoarders and I see these old, broken down people who have massive, beautiful homes I would love to have, and they've stacked every room to the ceiling with... shit. Sometimes literally shit, but more often it's just junk. Things that were on sale. Each thing advertised to them, promised that it would make them the person they were meant to be, or to help them lose that weight they've been trying to lose for 50 years. That piece of furniture that would finally complete the room. And they did that on, and on, and on, and now their beautiful home is ruined, and most of the stuff is too. And oftentimes the person themselves are harmed too, with early onset illness and injury.
America needs to get our shit together. And worse still we've exported our disease in great quantity to the rest of the world, both as trash, and as the vacuous hollow culture that consumerism drives.
I have 2 kids in college and I'm trying to sell my house. So I've decluttered to make the house presentable and I'm waiting for my kids to graduate and get their own places so I can give them their crap back. Storage unit makes sense for me. But this is likely to last only 2-4 years and then I'll have downsized enough.
Going to college should not be considered moving out. They have moved out only after they have been done with college for at least a year. Until then they are trying to figure out life. Home is still your house, they are just not living there.
Once they are out of college and on their own though they need to figure out what to do about their stuff.
I'm in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, and self storage facilities are popping up around here like weeds. I have a storage unit and I'm trying to clear it out. I'm tired of the monthly fees that keep going up. I got it when I had to clear out my late sister's house and I wanted time to go through things and decide what to keep. When I moved last year, I got a larger unit, thinking I would need to declutter my townhouse prior to showing it. It turned out my agent wasn't that concerned about my clutter, but I did move some idle tech stuff into the unit. I was hoping to get a house with a big basement for my future tech hoarding needs, and I wanted to keep this stuff. As it turned out, I ended up in a rancher with no basement, so now I'm getting rid of old tech I'll never have space for. I'd have saved a lot of money if I'd just done that a year ago. I now have a much smaller unit that I hope to be rid of next year. Self storage units are definitely a mixed blessing.
I also have all of the family antique furniture, some of which goes back three or more generations. I have no heirs and no idea what I'll do with it all, but I don't want to leave it for my executor to deal with. At least it's in the house and not in an expensive storage unit.
I'm also in the Maryland suburbs and I'm trying to dispose of several generations worth of stuff while avoiding having to use a storage unit. Thankfully, we have a lot of deserving organizations that take charitable donations. However, my old tech collection just seems to grow and fill any space I gain from getting rid of what I consider junk.
the DC area is a different story tho -- tons of rotation through the area due to military and fed gov. they come, they go, sometimes they come back, etc.
you're rounding out a 26 year military career and looking at retirement but are going to do one more 2-year stint in Norfolk/Missouri/Georgia/whatever and don't feel like selling your house -- storage unit
you work for a junior house rep who may not make it through the next election cycle, and since youre a staffer you can't afford anything larger than a shoebox, but still need to bring your stuff, some of which you can't fit -- storage unit
That last bit is important. For a generation reduced to rooming in small apartments, $100-$200 a month is a lower marginal cost than a larger room/apartment. Maybe not worth it for stuff you can easily replace, but if you have enough things that never come back once they goes away...
I’m closer to Annapolis annd Ft. Meade and we have two huge self-storage facilities that just opened up within a month less than a mile from each other.
There’s lots of military folks around here so maybe people are more likely around here to store stuff for a few years if they get deployed somewhere else and plan to move the family back after? I dunno.
I’ve used self-storage twice in my life: once in college over the summer before moving into a new apartment the next school year and once when we had our first child about a year before moving to a new city and larger house, which let us make room for baby stuff while keeping things we’d use when we had more space.
If it's good antique furniture, your executor will auction it. I used to frequent an auction house in DC (it has now moved to Rockville) that auctioned this sort of thing all the time once a week. Clearly there were regulars who scooped stuff up, I suppose to sell in their antique shops.
i always thought they were a neat idea (they only barely started appearing where i live in the last ~10 years) but it seemed a bit strange that they were so common
This article takes the view of the consumer, "Why do so many people pay to store items they almost never use?". But in actuality, the interesting part of this is why is there so much supply of self-storage businesses?
The answer is: cash flow. Self-storage businesses are the almost perfect solution for someone with a good size (but not enormous) bucket of money that they want to put to work generating cashflow:
1. Cheap build out (cheap land, cheap facilities)
2. Almost entirely hands-off (no employees, automated entry)
3. Low liability (low risk of customers suing you)
4. Low overhead (just pay for taxes, electricity, minimal maintenance)
5. Reliable monthly cash flow
The abundant supply of these businesses, I suspect, tends to generate demand: it's easier to pay $80/month to store your junk than spend the time and emotional labor of picking through what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. That ends up being captive long-term revenue.
I disagree with the last point -- it's a pain to gather a bunch of things up, put them in vehicles (or rent a truck), find a storage facility that isn't full, rent the unit, haul your things over to the unit.. all the while ignoring that you're putting off whatever culling and disposal ceremony you should actually be engaging in.
My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year. Choosing storage over that seems harder.
Donation isn't that easy if one has to find someone who actually desires each item. It requires a lot of online posts, communication, and overall effort, but this ensures that each item finds a new home that's right for it.
Best to look up what people actually need. There is a lot of this junk we collect that just gets junked by the donation groups turning into a cost center.
Donating to donation groups isn't a great donation. It's better to catalog and post each item, communicate with people who want it, and thereby find it a new home that's right for it. Granted, this is not possible for all items, especially never for clothing.
Yes, and every time this narrative comes up we seem to conveniently ignore that this is highly correlated with renting instead of buying a home and people of all ages enjoying frequent travel.
If you move often enough within a small radius, you will highly value your storage unit. It's not necessarily just a place for junk. Many people rotate their things when their apartment lease is up or even seasonally. If you live near water, you might even store a boat. Many facilities also offer RV storage. Personally, when I had roommates I would keep my most important stuff in there instead of at home.
The attacks against storage units are engagement bait for nerds about a non-story.
I think, like a lot of other communities, HN has a poser problem. People just parrot and brigade for whatever topic gets some traction with a popular opinion. They don't question how that opinion got popular and they don't care what is being said. They're trying to fit in and collect discussions and memorize talking points. These are the same people who insist AI is replacing humans... maybe their kind of human.
It happened with crypto and it happened with AI. Now that we're back to the usual boring topics it's happening to the most random trivia.
Basically any opinion from the top 100 youtubers will be parroted here on HN. In the past few years, it's been a whole lot of urban planning stuff because of the changes in the real estate market.
I'm glad you have free visits to the dump for it. I've never lived anywhere where I wouldn't have to also pay to get my trash hauled away, so it's a big pain with old mattresses or furniture honestly.
> My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year.
Where I live in Norway the recycling station is open three days a week and I can take stuff there free as often as I like up to 2 000 kg of stuff per year.
It has never occurred to me that there would be a limit on the number of visits. Or have I misunderstood?
US here. where I am: Recycling is free, hazardous waste is open a few days a month (also free), appliances are free, and rubbish is measured by weight (they weigh your vehicle on the way in and out). They pay you to take metal.
Without any fee beyond the required annual rubbish bill, my municipality will let me set out up to 20 (!) bags of trash per week with up to 50 lb (!) in them every Tuesday. I can throw out two tons of trash per month without having to haul anything anywhere or pay any extra fees.
Clearly this is madness, but it does make it a lot easier to throw shit out than put it in a storage unit.
Trust me, given how many people just accumulate trash because it's expensive, that's an absolutely sane and excellent policy. As a society, we want people to use trash disposal, because the alternative is expensive, painful, and disgusting.
You can literally tell which municipalities in my state have been hoodwinked by the Karens into adopting "pay as you throw". They're the ones where there's trash everywhere.
It's like these people can't think two steps ahead (I'd go so far as to say that's the defining feature of regulatory policy in this state). You just gave people a financial incentive to litter and dump.
Alaska was like this. Taking your trash to the transfer station or dump was expensive, so people throw it all over the place, trashing the highways and vacant land, or they use burn barrels and cause massive pollution torching plastic and other things. It's pretty horrifying to see such beautiful areas littered up :-(
Are you serious? Here in NH it's either once or twice a year. I call it "The real Father's Day" and plan to have a couple of podcasts or similar queued up for the wait in line.
In Copenhagen (and I think it's similar in most of Denmark) there's a fireproof cupboard in the basement of my apartment building for hazardous waste. Houses have a small red box they can leave out if they have something.
Making hazardous waste disposal inconvenient seems like a good way to have it end up in the normal waste stream.
Oh very much so. By the time I finally got to a hazardous waste day early enough to make it tolerable, the milk crate full of various poisons and extremely flammable toxins I had would have put low-level terrorist orgs to shame. I might as well have had a glowing suitcase.
Good god! Why on earth would you make it difficult to dispose of hazardous waste safely?
Here in Blighty, the local tip (sorry 'recycling centre') is open throughout the week and accepts everything from used engine oil and battery acid to asbestos. Granted some of the smaller tips might not have such facilities, but they will direct you to one that will.
All free of charge for non-commercial users. (Business will have their own regulated arrangements for hazardous goods).
Recycling dropoff is normally free in North America. Waste that cannot be recycled is typically charged by weight for the cost of disposal at waste facilities. You can visit either as often as you like, but will pay to have your garbage disposed of. The GP lives in a place where you do not have to pay for non-recyclable waste the first two times you visit per year. This is normally done to encourage people with a large volume of waste from a single cleanup to dispose of waste properly (dumping on vacant land is a big problem in many parts of NA).
Recycling drop-off is not free for me, and neither is having recycling picked up at the house. If I need to drop stuff off at the dump, it's a flat fee per drop-off with a limit of one trailer load per drop-off. Burn barrels are also illegal in Maricopa County, so Amazon boxes just go in the trash.
Where I live (America, but waste processing is all handled at the local level and policies differ), the landfill has a "resident convenience center" with a bunch of dropoff stations for various types of stuff, along with a big ledge you can toss things over to be sent to the landfill.
When you arrive, and attendent will ask and/or look at what you have and tell you where to put it. Sometimes the answer is "you can't dump that for free. Go to the transfer station and pay by the pound".
In theory, there is also an annual wait limit to free dumps, but they can't actually enforce it.
Many things invoke "but this is a perfectly good..." I had a LaserJet monochrome printer. I knew I would never use it because I now have a color model, and if the color one broke I would replace it immediately. "But this is a perfectly good printer." It sat for a few years on a shelf before I finally tossed it. Resale nets too little to be worthwhile.
Other things represent work. This is old files in the office. My workplace was full of file cabinets with drawers of papers. It was decades of accumulated knowledge. No one would ever read them or use them. But throwing them away seemed disrespectful of all the work that went into those papers. For these things, I think of my daughter's math homework. It is extremely valuable and lots of work went into it, and there is zero reason to retain it the instant it comes home.
Other things represent memories. They embody a long friend or lost relative, or a vacation, or an occasion, or a feeling they caused when worn, used, etc. Discarding it seems to disrespect the memory. I try to keep these things to a minimum - keep representative samples, and digitize to the extent possible.
This is why discarding things is hard. I don't want storage space and have none, but I completely understand why people would rather shove apparently useless things into a storage locker. It's easier to pay to store it than to discard it. I go a step farther and say that it's worth it for folks to pay to store these things. It's worth $80/month or whatever it costs to have that stuff sitting in a storage box, even if they know they will never ever use or even look at them.
sadly, it is often true though. I learned early on that "free" usually meant "trash I don't want to deal with disposing of". There are of course people who don't do that (like myself) but that "price" is unfortunately a real signal to pay attention to
About memories - throwing away the associated item often feels like admitting that you can't go back to the moment represented by the item. It's hard to face that small grief so it's easier to keep it there.
My theory is self storage is actually in competition with getting a bigger house.
If your family is seriously considering moving to a bigger house, and that move is going to cost you $20,000 that makes renting a storage unit for $1000/year sound like a great deal.
> My theory is self storage is actually in competition with getting a bigger house.
Obviously true. If one had a house with space for posessions, there would be no need for storage. As houses become ever smaller (for a given $/sqft) external self-storage becomes the only affordable way to gain some space.
My parents were poor but back ~70 years ago it was still achievable for a lower income family to buy a house with some space. As an engineer in Silicon Valley, the largest house I can afford is barely twice the square footage of my childhood bedroom. In such a tiny house we fit 3 people, all with hobbies and equipment, child has toys, etc. A house with enough space would be another million at the very least. So that's impossible.
So compared to that, a couple hundred a month for self-storage is a bargain. I hate it, would rather have the equity in a larger property but it is impossible to afford.
So yes, that's why storage facilities have such a boom. Housing by $/sqft is impossibly expensive.
You are missing one other issue: it seems easier than it really is. There are only so many people who would use self storage. You see a full self storage place in town and thing you can get a share if you just build one. What you don't understand is demand is not elastic: if you build a second site in town you go from 100 units with 90 used (a good usage rate), do 200 units in town but still only 90 used.
Eventually price crashes far enough below retail that commercial users start filling out a lot of the space because the cost per square foot is lower than their own space.
Like you shove your winter PPE, your emergency stash of spare parts for process equipment, etc, etc, in some self storage lockers and get the same job done using less square footage with extensive compliance burden (or get more job done using same square footage).
You are missing the biggest benefit of a self storage business - the appreciation of the underlying real estate. When you dig into the financials of the major self storage businesses you'll see they are essentially REITs that have better cashflow. They can pick an up-and-coming area, do a minimal build-out with low annual overhead, and then down the road when the facility would be needing overhauls and maintenance the underlying property has typically appreciated so much that it dwarfs all other associated revenue streams and makes sense to sell and raze the existing structure. Great business model if you have a long enough timeline.
This is also why some startups trying to revolutionize the self storage model had extreme headwinds - if you are renting the underlying properties and trying to make the storage business profitable you are at an extreme disadvantage to the larger players who can subsidize operating costs with portfolio appreciation.
This same concept is also true of McDonalds historically - they own the land, lease it to franchisees, and realize the appreciation themselves. McDonalds are fairly economically valuable, so the capital gains by the time they're cleared and resold as development often dwarfs the value of the franchise fees.
The whole reason why the Catholic Church doesn't allow priests to be married anymore was because it used to be that the individual churches were mostly the property of the priest, and would be passed down generationally (with some restrictions). The church phased in the ban on marriage so that over time, the churches would all in up in the estate of a priest with no heirs, where they'd become the property more formally of the Catholic Church proper. Today the Catholic Church is the single largest landowner in the world, with about 170 million acres.
More recent religious organizations have taken note of that, with LDS owning about 2.4M acres.
That does not sound correct. Priests in Eastern rite Catholic churches get married, but they do not own the land in which their parish chirch stands and they do not pass that land on to their children. Note that the Catholic Church itself does not own that land, either. As I understand it, in most cases the parish land is owned by a Catholic episcopal See or eparchia, as in Latin rite Catholic Churches, in which the diocese owns the land.
Your comment dragged me into a rabbit hole, which is always a welcome surprise.
From my readings, one can always debate whether this reason for celibacy is whole or not (of course, more holy reasons were given, like purity of the ritual among others), but avoiding inheritance from father to sons was certainly a big factor. By barring heirs from the equation, it solved the whole dispute over inheritance. Yet, when it comes to clerical office and priesthood, "property" is not quite right, since it's mostly about usufruct and benefices, moreso. Which can be significant assets, that goes without saying, hence the Church did everything it could, for holy and not-so-holy-reasons, that traditional generational transmission does not apply. No next generation, no problem.
Quite importantly to the Roman Catholic Church, they wanted to avoid dynasties of priests that would grow in importance and out of their control, so they did whatever they could (ban marriage and fatherhood) so that a mis-aligned priest would only be a temporary nuisance to the Institution.
A lot went into this short burst of investigation, like the fact that early Churches were private property of land-owners, building churches for indulgences and power, reinforcing their ties with the Church, and I may dig deeper. Thanks for your comment again, if you have some references you recommend, I'd appreciate you share them!
I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean I or the GP used LLMs?
If you mean I did, yes, I have, to begin with, to get an overview and links. But to do any of the reading or to write my comment? No. What's wrong with that?
They don't have to ever sell the properties. Property can be assessed by a third party and then function as collateral against a low-interest loan, which is real money.
Not that I think McDonald's will ever really find themselves in a pinch, but if they did, they would additionally be able to liquidate selected properties for cash. When you are rich enough, the promise of having money in the future is just as good as actually having money. It doesn't work like that for most of us, but that's the nature of risk assessment in finance.
Cashflow from renting to a franchisee must be fantastic. You pick the locations and the decor. If the business does well you prosper, but if the business does poorly you're insulated from the downside, the rent is due either way! If the franchisee can't hack it you repossess the building and rent it to some other suc^H^H^Hfranchisee.
It's actually hilarious sometimes. The business models that generate most scorn and incredulity on HN are the straightforward ones. They convert labor pretty much directly to a very basic product with a clear demand by society, that can't possibly be profitable, are we sure it's not actually a front for Real Estate or AI or Tax Evasion?
I'm sure real estate is the primary business model of McDonald's but franchisees wouldn't be paying the rent and fees if the restaurant model itself wasn't very profitable.
Most restaurants in Europe generate an average of 250k in net cash flow per average restaurant, that's few years of work before ROI.
It's very easy to lose money running a McDonald's (or any restaurant) if you do not keep a very close eye on all your controllable expenses. Most franchisees need multiple stores to cover all the overhead and actually be profitable.
McDonalds's Corp, the landlord, is in a better position but they also don't want to see stores fail, it's bad for their image.
Still looks good enough on financial statements if you’re ig enough to care about them, and it makes for great collateral in the process of buying the next one.
Well it's not like it didn't work out very well for Trump. Idk if it's 4D Chess but a huge part of the expense that lead to bankruptcy was licencing of the Trump brand. Can't pay all the other vendors because we first had to pay to license the name. OK, bankruptcy.
Or, you jack up prices to pay for the renovations. Self storage out in the middle of nowhere is cheap, but self storage in a urban location that's easily accessible is not.
Both are correct. The decision will come down to what the cash flow and demand actual is and what they expect the future land to be worth. Sometimes you just let it go down to a low tier of maintenance, avoid all R&M and ride it out until you’re ready to cash in. The appreciation is collateral for future developments to so the model scales well.
As long as home ownership declines, storage facilities will continue to flourish. There may be a blip when all the boomer downsizing demand evaporates as their kids will trash the junk.
Yeah, came here to post something similar. I used to hang around in real estate circles, and two businesses come up often: Self storage and car wash. These are two things people just can't get enough of.
(Car wash usage doesn't go down even during a recession, apparently).
There's aesthetic reasons (I'm proud of my car, I like it to look nice), and practical reasons (Leaving mud, grit, salt etc, will wear and corrode my car faster).
Where I live, summer rain doesn't really clean the car (if that's what you care about), and in the winter you are shortening your cars life by years if you don't try and get the salt off regularly.
Yeah, those are good points I hadn't really thought of much. Thanks! I guess it's less of a priority for me because I bought my car for $1000 and it came with Michigan rust already. Lol.
When I bought my 8 year old car, it was from the Midwest and the mechanic I asked to check it out said "Don't buy - it's got a good amount of rust because of the salt they use". I asked whether it means the car is less safe. He said "No, just more repairs and potentially costlier repairs. I said "Over the remaining life of the car, how much extra would it cost?" In today's dollars, the answer was $2000.
I bought the car. It easily lasted another 7 years before it died in a collision.
My car prior was a purely Midwest car, and I rarely washed it. It happily lasted 16 years. I passed it on to someone else, and he used it for a few more years.
Coincidently I was thinking about car wash just few days back, One was bought in 2014, never car washed seems fine so far. Another was bought in 2022 again no wash so far and no plan to.
I used to think everyone does it, I will do at some point but that point never came. Inside we vacuum and wipe every few months. Washed mats once in an year or so but car body wash rain takes care of it.
I'm 62, and grew up near Detroit. I remember cars developing major rust holes after just a few years. The rusting also affected the inside of the engine compartment, and it did make repairs more difficult. There was an industry of aftermarket rustproofing shops, that were a scam. Every teenager with a car (which was still rare) learned how to patch rust holes with Bondo.
My first car, the frame rusted out and had to be welded back together.
Toyota and Honda put a stop to that. They did a number of things: Better steel alloys, better coatings, painting the bodywork before it could start rusting, eliminating places in the body where water could accumulate, etc.
Today, you rarely see totally rusted out cars on the road.
The bodies are better, but I can assure you, the frames and suspension parts are not. They still rust out here in the salt belt after 10-15 years, depending on the brand and how often you drive them. If Michigan instituted mandatory annual car inspections, it would take about half the (still working, not unsafe) cars off the road.
Yeah my wife and I inherited her parents' Highlander from Boston when they moved back to their home country. The drive shaft literally fell out on the road because the brackets holding it on rusted out. Was lucky I had enough momentum to pull over.
No, I watch video of cars coming into the shop and the models from the Midwest are usually in pretty rough shape due to all the corrosion from the salt on the roads. And brand doesn't seem to matter.
The old days the cars would rust and take the frame with it (I've literally had them get so bad they basically folded up) - modern vehicles will stay pretty darn decent until the first time the paint gets broken, then it'll begin - but the unibody usually lasts quite a long time.
I've always lived in the midwest. Every car I've ever owned has been a car from the midwest, and has been driven in the midwest.
The salt from the road is driven by car tires into a briny mist that coats everything. It blocks vision through windows. It accumulates in chunks that can be kicked (like mud also can, except corrosive). It wicks its way into tiny crevices and betwixt layers and infects every part of the car that can be infected, and once there it rots everything that it can rot.
And I don't mean just the bodywork; that part has been getting better with improved processes and paint.
But stamped control arms often rust away while the ball joints and bushings are still in good form. Electrical connections rot. Frames and frame-like components often have scaly holes in them. Every exposed engine part corrodes; uncoated steel turns black, red, or brown; galvanized and aluminum parts turn white and kind of fuzzy (and stuck). Our junkyards are full of rusted-out hulks of cars with drivetrains that still work properly, even if they're ugly.
Fixing things when they break is tedious and time-consuming, and the most-sane approach to any repair on a car that's more than a few years old is to go into it with an expectation everything that doesn't crumble from rust is instead frozen with rust.
The work itself unilaterally causes a person a learn new facets of their verbal and mechanical vocabulary that they never even knew possible, and is arduous in ways that would test the emotional stamina of a Buddhist monk.
With enough cleaning and care (and just rinsing things off by driving in the rain), a car that is from the midwest can be largely saved. Getting rid of all of the salt slows the process down very dramatically.
But a car that is regularly driven in the midwestern winter is in the midst of a fairly quick process of being returned to the earth.
It's just a fact that is plain and that we live with every day. We do work to prevent it; on a warm-ish day in January, cars will line up around the block to get into a car wash and have a chance to dry out before ice freezes every orifice closed.
But it's not fear, I don't think. Just as we accept the sun coming up every day and disappearing over the opposite horizon every night, we accept the rot as something that will inevitably consume the most expensive machine that we own and that this will happen on a schedule that we play very little part in.
I saw rusted out cars and trucks all over the place when I visited northern Minnesota and the UP of Michigan last year. Even late-model cars that couldn't have been more than 5-10 years old had rusted out rocker panels.
Watch the channel Auto Parts City on YouTube, I assure you it is not overblown. It's a junkyard owner. A ton of cars come through there that run fine and could otherwise be very serviceable, but the frame/body are crumbling from rust, so they have to be crushed. We're talking cars that are 10 years old. And yes, it even includes Toyotas and Hondas. (In fact they're more likely to end up crushed for that reason than another car is, since a Nissan or Hyundai's transmission and engine won't last long enough for rust to really end its life.)
From a certain perspective, maybe some people don't care if they would be getting rid of the car in like 5 years, but if you do want to keep a car 15 years and you live in "salt country" I would strongly suggest doing something about the salt regularly.
Selection bias. Cars that were not treated for salt, and didn't die, didn't end up in the junkyard for stories to be told.
My first car spent its first 15 years in the Midwest. No garage. Very irregular car washes (perhaps once a year when I owned it). It lasted about 20 years total. When I lived there, I didn't know anyone who had to give up a car due to rust. There definitely was rust, but not something that caused the car to break down.
Or a garden hose, bucket of soapy water, and a sponge. At least if you have a house with a garden hose. Many apartment complexes offer the amenity of an area for washing cars though.
I live next to a college. The Sororities will hold car washes. Of course, they ask us to get out of the car first, so that Cheerleading movie w/ Kristen Dundst lied. :-)
I think I may have an autistic affinity for washing machines, but I would LOVE to own a laundromat. I feel like this would fit into the self storage/ car wash category.
There's a guy Investment Joy on YouTube who you would probably enjoy watching, then. Just a pretty normal guy who runs a few small businesses. I think he has at least one car wash and a laundromat among other things. He talks about the various costs and problems, too.
Ha, I watched some guy on Youtube who bought a carwash. It's seems like a decent way to basically make some money with not a ton of work. Plus, you can get a lot of money as cash too, makes it easy to not report as income, which I bet a lot of their owners do.
That's the answer, it's a way to squat on land. Another way I know of is a golf course. It's more maintenance but it's a way to generate some cash to offset property taxes and then wait for a decade or two and sell.
I had an acquaintance who had a couple of driving ranges for golf for that exact purpose. He said it kept the property taxes lower than if he had built nothing on them. His only goal was to be break-even until he sold.
$80/month that becomes $120/month and then $200/month within a year or two, and they mail you a postcard to tell you about it. I guess that's another nice perk of the business.
The other perk is they charge “mandatory” insurance fees. It is easy to opt out if you prove you have insurance but at least the facility I am using makes it seem like it is hard.
They will also "accidentally" re-add the insurance fees. I had a storage unit for about a year while sorting through my brother's estate, and without fail every 3 months the insurance fee would get added back on. I was so glad when I was able to cancel that lease, it was maddening to have to keep calling about the same issue.
My son's college did the same thing. Every term, the billing for tuition and fees would include (a very expensive) fee for heath insurance. I would have to declare again that he was covered on my plan as a dependent and he didn't need the school's plan.
I'm convinced they do this because the kids using student loans aren't paying attention.
This literally just happened to me for a storage unit we got to store a bunch of baby stuff while deciding if we’re going to have another kid.
Started at $87/month for a 5x10 unit. Plenty of space, and I added a six-foot-tall shelving unit ($50 from Home Depot) to keep it organized and access stuff when needed.
We’ve had it for maybe 18 months now, and I just realized it’s $204/month for the last 6 months.
It’s at the top of my list to eliminate this storage unit within the next few months.
We also had a 12 month personal limit on how long we’d keep it, but life happens.
I know someone in the biz, so two other ways people are making money:
1) Buying land and getting it rezoned for storage and then selling it on -- it's getting harder to get permits to build storage as people get sick of them, so there is a whole economy in knowing how and where to build them and only dealing with the paperwork.
2) Storage unit construction is a huge business now.
You're on the nose. My parent passed shortly after I went to University. It was tough and much easier to put all of her belongings in storage for four years, then it was dealing with it then and there while renting and in between jobs.
I used to work at a company that was the industry leader in business management software for storage facility owners. I don't remember exact numbers but a lot of facilities are mom & pop type operations where people basically invested in the business as a retirement plan. It's a surprisingly stable and profitable industry. Economy good? People buy too much crap and want to store it. Economy bad? People have to move and downsize their housing and need to store stuff. Large incentive for tenants to avoid delinquency because they risk their stuff being auctioned off.
I paid around that for a 5x10 unit in a medium sized midwestern city for a year during covid when I worked fully remote and moved back to my parents' house for a year.
I thought the article was predominantly about supply side. There are more quotes from providers than consumers. The article mentions every point you’ve made. You’ve summarized the article bang on.
It's crazy the kind of crap people keep, of course is not crap to them, but I've known people that have literal container loads of unorganized crap they will never ever see again... Most of the people I know that have loads of stuff store always claim they'll need these things at some point and so they rather have them there in storage instead of dumping or giving them away, and I have never seen them pick a single item, because of course after a few years of storing things there is literally no way to know where things are.
It's infuriating... I dump stuff all the time... I probably have like 50 things in my life including t-shirts, which obviously contributes to my enragement.
Most people I know with a self storage place are not using them like the article. (though some do - YMMV). Some use it as a warehouse for their business - they rotate stuff in and out. A carpenter might buy a pallet of nails once every few months and use the storage every few days to refill the truck. Several people keep off-season holiday decorations in storage and rotate it back home for the season. Others keep fishing stuff in storage and stop by storage on their way to/from the fishing spot.
If you have anything in storage you should look at it at least once a year to decide if it is worth saving. It is okay to say that "I love this thing from Grandma even though I don't have room for it", but you need to decide it is still worth it.
I tend to think the people who use it for seasonal stuff are definitely Doing It Right. After all, using it that way just enables you to have a smaller (or less cluttered) house but have the same things. When I had one, it was definitely not that. It was just a way to procrastinate doing something with stuff that I could have replaced anything useful with the year’s rental fees.
Those all seem like excellent, healthy ways to use a storage unit.
Unfortunately, I am now paying for two storage units for my mother-in-law's garbage. I wish we could just hire a junk truck to haul it all out; maybe someday...
tl;dw - As far as businesses go, they require low capital to construct, have low operational costs, and also operate as a way to hold real estate/land while also generating revenue.
The people that use them are usually dealing with some life event such as moving, a death in the family, divorce, and just want some solution to house possessions.
He liked travelling in it, but what he really liked was hanging out inside it while drinking cocktails with friends and family, and if he could have done that while parked in an air-conditioned man cave he might never have taken it on the road.
There were a few house boats at a dry storage facility I occasionally drove by, and once there were a bunch of people hanging out on one drinking and partying, miles from the water. I thought it was hilarious, but it did show how much of the cost is the view. Slip fees aren't cheap, and house boat rentals are crazily expensive.
I've always thought that it would be cool to buy wetland and go in the reverse direction. Instead of illegally fill it illegally dredge it. Then put a house boat on it. They'll never see it coming. The whole system is designed to prevent filling.
This reminds me of the endearing ex-husband in the show Cougar Town. He lived (and hung out) on just such a boat. I know, the name sounds cheesy af, but the show was a great one.
My personal experience with this is my father, who lives in a rural area with 10+ acres, has placed several shipping containers on the property as storage for his junk. He's charged just over $500/mo for them. He's had them for 18 years. The value of property in those containers is maybe $5000.
Consumerism is a disease, and the USA is super good at it.
you also need to factor in other things, like sentimental value (may be very high), rarity of some things, and catastrophic events "insurance" (e.g. Covid or similar events where obtaining some things is not guaranteed).
At that point he could have financed out a pole barn or any other useful structure and owned. I can understand urban people needing space but that is expensive
Hoarding can be at least somewhat motivated by frugality: you never know what you'll end up needing someday, and you don't need to spend money on new stuff if you kept an old one around... somewhere...
I've heard stories of people who developed the habit of keeping virtually everything out of living through the Great Depression.
If by frugality you mean something more along the lines of minimalism then I agree
In Europe we just fill the garage to the fucking ceiling and park the car outside. And of course nothing ever gets out of the garage until you die, then it's your kids problem and usually everything goes straight to a landfill.
Hopefully developers take notice then, maybe we can build new neighborhoods with the garage off to the side in an awkward position for the occasional boat haul. Then we can clear up the fronts of homes and replace it with something prettier.
I have never paid for self-storage and have never understood why they are so popular. I've known people paying for a self-storage unit to store furniture they are also still making payments on.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadWhile there are good use cases -
> The United States is the world leader, with roughly ninety per cent of global capacity. [...] there are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined. Annual revenues are estimated to be more than forty billion dollars.
> I asked a Welsh facility manager I met in Las Vegas what his customers keep in their units, and he said, “It’s . . . it’s . . . rubbish.”
> My wife and I have a friend whose mother died in 2006. She and her siblings decided to sell their mother’s furniture and donate the proceeds to a charity that she would have approved of. “We put everything in storage temporarily, and it’s all still there,” our friend told me. She figures that they’ve spent at least fifty thousand dollars in rental fees so far—more than they could get from selling the furniture.
That probably doesn't even consider inflation, $1 in 2006 was worth $1.60 in today's money. People are really bad at long term financial planning but also get really attached to objects with some sentimental value. So this is a market where it's even easier to exploit that poor financial education.
All the while paying for the storage unit, occasionally talking about the cherished "family heirlooms" therein; those things she'd bring out of storage when she got a bigger place. Especially a china cabinet she had to fight her sister for when her mother died.
Now she's having health problems and is approaching the end of her life. I'm sure she'll keep paying for the storage unit until the end but soon enough the day will come my wife and I have to travel several states away to empty the contents of the storage unit into a dumpster. Including the "beloved" china cabinet that her kids have already decided they have zero interest in (and probably smells of mildew and mouse urine at this point).
I don't know the total amount spent on the storage unit over the years but I've got to think it's in the 5 figures. Enough to pay for a car, or some nice trips, or ... to keep old bedframes in a big closet.
https://www.thespruce.com/swedish-death-cleaning-4801461
Well I haven't died yet, so I suppose the time is right.
Go to any warm state in the country and ride through the parking lots at night. If you are the observant type, you should see an astonishing number of folks living in their vehicles.
And home ownership is not only downward, but no longer part of the American dream for most people now. Storage facilities for many, are a place to lay down, or rent hope that things won't always be "this way".
We need to fix this. It's not just drugs and mental problems anymore.
Downtown in US cities parking is prohibitive, but that is only a small part of the city. Most of the city you can park for free. You want to move the car every day just so it doesn't look abandoned, but otherwise this is a cheap way to live and you get transportation as a bonus.
That tax I mentioned before makes very old beat-up cars not worth keeping.
One of the main upsides of living in a house in Sweden is not having to pay for parking. But even so the increase heating bills in winter can easily cost more than a car installment depending on your HVAC and insulation.
It's been 30 years since anyone sold a new carbureted production car in the US, and for just as long cars have had OBDII, and it's been 50 years since cars were sold without catalytic converters.
There was a time, immediately after those technologies were developed, when older cars polluted significantly more than newer cars, but modern engine designs have been around long enough that cars old enough to be big polluters are expensive collectors pieces.
There may be an occasional car with a blown head gasket or piston ring polluting excessively, but they won't run for long in that condition. Thanks to CAFE standards limiting the availability of smaller vehicles in the US, the average 20-to-30-year-old gasoline engine probably pollutes less per mile than the average 0-to-5-year-old gasoline engine.
Like god forbid some dude live out of a 2002 Town and Country that parks at a revolving series of strip malls eats a quart of oil every 2k.
I think it should be permissible to allow some dude to live out of a 2002 Town and Country that parks at a revolving series of strip mall. I currently work with several people who use a similar method to keep themselves and their kids off the streets.
The phrasing might be bad in that I was pointing out the overall bleakness of the overall situation; no insurance, no registration, no maintenance, but the intent was to show that they are teetering on the brink of falling into an abyss that is very difficult to come out of, not that they were some sort of anonymous nebulous mass.
The main thing I have been struggling with personally with working with this issue (housing, addiction) over 25 years is that it is such a huge, seemingly unsolvable problem that no one is able to address systematically and when I think about the big picture I feel overwhelming helplessness, but find hope working in much more local situations.
The car comment was just an observation to the parent comment, with some additional commentary on how it isn't at all a big luxury, rather a bleak situation where the car owner is in a very precarious situation. Reading it now, I do see how it could be misconstrued as some sort of zealotry of people of a certain bent, but I think I am might be bent the opposite way of what you think!
The entire sentence after that came across like a giant dog whistle for the kind of people who are never out of arms reach of their clutching pearls. The only word you missed was "blight". I was expecting it to be followed by a call for some sort of government action.
Might just be a reflection of the language of whoever your social circle is but it came across real Karen-ey
I’ll use the word though; our inability to provide housing and basic essential services to our fellow human beings is a blight.
When people are falling into homelessness, they keep the car for longer because (a) it generates income, either directly through something like Uber or by getting you to a job on time, (b) lower cost of ownership and (c) it serves as shelter in a pinch.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.
When you say “we need to fix this” no one can agree what “this” is. There is no one “this” and it becomes a morass of generational systemic issues, localized problems, competing views on economics, morality, government and more. It reminds me of when tech people show up to “fix” education. It just isn’t a single issue.
I agree we need to fix something, but as soon as I think about the big picture it feels futile and I have been involved in efforts for decades.
Yes, "fix" is a weaselly word, and 'futility' might be more appropriate if the subject has similar etiology to many of our other problems here.
At minimum, tolerance is due to the ones not causing significant problems. In my opinion, a substantial portion of the US will experience homelessness in the near future, but that won't discuss well around here. And note, I am from Florida. The East Coast version is quite different, as well as most of the median state situation. Very different. Especially in places where drugs are not the impetus.
The housing problem feels so daunting that I struggle to understand how one could help move the needle. Knowing which organizations to volunteer with or places to donate that actually improve the situation would be a helpful start.
Only you can really define what is productive to you, but people are always needed for running the shelters, working in the kitchens and more. It isn't glamorous at all.
People need to be transported from one facility to another, to medical appointments, to court, to counseling and more.
I currently work with youth at risk, helping them finish their high school degrees and families who are right at the brink of falling into serious problems.
I can't really tell you which organizations to volunteer, as there is a spectrum of them; some are religious like the Salvation Army and some have social and political agendas that may not align with you. Without recommending or condemning, for example, you will find organizations who work with pregnant teens who are anti-abortion. This may not be for you. The same goes for sexual and gender identity issues.
One thing that seems very unpolitical to me, and it is how I started, was volunteering at a local shelter. If you have more affinity with helping women, there are shelters that deal with them. If you have more affinity with dealing with people with addiction issues, there are shelters dealing with them.
Because of my background in the military, education and addiction, I find affinity working with veterans, addicts and at risk youth.
The problem is daunting, and the needle feels unmovable most of the time. In the big scheme of things I feel powerless, but I know reducing local misery is possible and is something I can help with.
I'm at the age where a lot of friends are starting to deal with parents passing away, and it is very stressful for the next-of-kin to not only have to deal with the grief of loss, but then have to figure out what to do with houses and storage units full of junk. Some attempt to pick through the crap to find the 0.1% with legit sentimental value, others have more energy and try to do yard sales / estate sales, but most just call the truck and haul everything to the dump.
I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china" and 1970s era stereo equipment. If you want to pass on something to your children they will appreciate, pass them a cleaned-out home or pre-arrange a junk hauler.
Some of what glitters _is_ gold!
Kinda legit: Most people who lived through the Great Depression learned a "never throw any possibly-useful thing away" ethos as a survival skill. And they often taught that to their own children. And stuff became obsolete far more slowly back then, and furniture repair was a normal things, and ...
More commonly - "leave it to my children" is an excellent self-delusion...er, I mean psychological dodge, if you don't want to deal with the physical work, time required, or mental grief of proper sorting and disposal. But note that the "mental grief" may not be internal to the person deciding to procrastinate. If some of their family really don't get along with each other, then paying rent to put off the angry family drama may be their least-bad option.
I have all sorts of “stuff” I would give away to someone who can use it. I just don’t want to spend 3 hours per object doing so via posting on Facebook marketplace, having 8 people flake out on pickup, and a Saturday afternoon killed because I need to wait around for someone to show up.
It gets worse with more esoteric things like nerdy electronic gear which is absolutely worth something to the right person, but that person happening to be in my area and also searching for that particular bit and bob at that exact moment are almost nothing. Some of these things can be hundreds of dollars if you need to order new or off eBay.
I’d be fine with giving it away to a reseller if I could. Just very difficult to throw it away since it’s so wasteful.
Maybe inheritance will have to start jumping generations due to how people die older and older. Nobody needs any inheritance anymore when they are 60 years old or more, unless they want to use it as blackmail to control their own children.
But that's just one sale on eBay for a thing that I know well, and that relates to an interest that I have.
Maintaining many sales on eBay is hard work, and maintaining many sales on eBay for stuff you're just trying to get rid of is a mountain of work.
And quite frustratingly, it's easy to find people who have strong opinions about other people's junk.
A house I bought once came with apartments upstairs, and one of them included a General Motors-designed fridge from the 1950s or 60s.
It worked well and the hardware was in good shape. It was free of meaningful rust. It was quiet. It would've been a great and simple restoration project for the right person, and some boomer might have eventually been very happy with paying quite a lot to have it softly purring away in their nostalgia cave.
I didn't want it at all. It was in the way of the process of turning the cheap clapped-out house I'd bought into a place where my family could live. It was just junk to me; vintage refrigerators aren't my bag.
And everyone who came by and saw it went through the same sequence: First, they admired it as an odd and somewhat beautiful anachronism. Then, they asked if it still worked, and opened the door and poked around with a melancholy sense of astonishment.
After that, unilaterally, they came the same revelation: "Well, you can't just get rid of it! That's worth a lot of money!"
Fine, whatever: If they think it's worth money, then they can certainly have some of it. I'd first offer to have them sell it and broker the deal, so we'd both make some cash from what was obviously something worth selling. "Go ahead and sell it," I'd say. "You want a 60/40 split? How does 80/20 sound? Let's chat."
Nobody took that deal. It was too much work for them to conceive of actually doing it.
And then, I'd offer to let them just have it, on the condition that it simply disappear and that it never be returned to me again. After all: If it's worth so much money, then it's a great bargain at the low, low cost of free. For a long time, nobody took that deal, either: This was also too much work.
---
Eventually, a couple of gristly dudes of indeterminate age came and hauled it down the stairs and into the bed of their pickup truck.
They didn't pay a dime for it, and they didn't scratch up the walls or those steep, tall stairs in any meaningful way.
They sold it for scrap, I'm sure, and it probably got turned into new Chevrolets or something... and I just don't care. The important part was that it finally disappeared and was never seen by me again.
I was very happy that someone finally took the deal. But that deal took years.
One man's trash may in fact be another man's treasure, but getting those two men into the same room at the same time can approach impossibility.
Yeah, you said it. I've also got a QX-949, but luckily no vintage refrigerators.
As much as the over-built, last-a-lifetime quality is a big component of owning of these old appliances, I can imagine how that fades when it's an object that weighs 800 pounds instead of 80.
The lights are generally not reliable on the 949 - particularly the radar display on the front-left (vumeter per channel, basically), so that’s also worth a service, if you can.
After that it’s the caps, as you probably know. The thing is with the quad ones, there’s literally two of everything in there.
Best of luck with restoring and selling it.
A lot of old furniture is better than all but very expensive new stuff. My kids like my parents' and grandparents' furniture.
My parents are still convinced I should keep the china set they gifted us for our wedding decades ago, because "What are you going to do if your boss comes over for dinner??". It's never been used.
Surely you ordinarily cook up at least once nice meal a week; eat it using the nice dinner service and bring a little elegance to your life (and who cares if you break a plate or two, it died doing what it was made for).
Are you genuinely asking where they get this idea? People are getting downvoted for giving plausible answers.
The simple one is they appreciated getting it from their parents. It's only very recent that everyone has a surplus of everything, including the parents themselves.
I'm kind of glad my parents didn't just throw a lot of stuff away.
There's little nobility in throwing out your fourth set of perfectly serviceable bed sheets or the nicked pair of nail clippers in the guest bathroom. Which leads to accumulation, like moss on a tree.
Then when you pass away and other people have to go through it all, they don't need those items because their household already has those items. I don't need 3 more flashlights and a kitchen table because I already have my own!
Nobody has that idea. People want to hold on to all their stuff, and they would bring it with them in death if they could. But since you can only travel with very light luggage from this world to the next, they tell a nice sounding lie that they're keeping and amassing stuff and wealth for their children when they die.
If they really wanted to help their children, they would do it while still alive.
The house sold more quickly than expected, so they were in a panic to move out.
They're not hoarders -- in fact, the house was always impeccably tidy, and not at all cluttered.
They had to get rid of SO much stuff. My dad was an only child, so he had kept so much stuff from his father before him. My mom was one of many, but the eldest, and the family archivist, so she has the photos and old movies and stuff.
Ultimately the biggest problem is their children (my sister and I) DON'T NEED THEIR STUFF. We're adults in our 40s and 50s. We have houses of our own, filled with furniture of our own. Smaller houses than our parents', smaller garages, already more cluttered than our parents'.
Yes, we took on some keepsakes we love, we took on some furniture to upgrade our own. But mostly, there just isn't room. I don't have room for 2 generations' worth of accumulated tools, no matter how handy they may be. I don't have a house full of empty walls waiting for artwork and pictures. We're already storing heirloom china from my wife's side of the family that we haven't touched in the 10 years we've had it, we don't need to store another set of heirloom dishes we'll never use at dinner parties we'll never hold.
As generations get spaced further and further apart, the heirs no longer need stuff to start lives of their own. As property gets more expensive, our homes get smaller, so we wouldn't even be able to use all the stuff if our homes were empty!
There's so much of it that is unremarkable. It fits into their house+garage, but it consumes a great abundance of space. There are, IIRC, 3 generations of China, each with its own China cabinet -- and I wouldn't know which dead person they once belonged to anyway. Tools. Furniture. Stacks of rough-sawn hardwood lumber, and logs.
I have enough furniture. I don't need rolling toolboxes full of mixed hoarded socketry, unsorted wrenches, and rusty tap-and-die sets in inch-standard sizes. The bench-mounted belt sander my dad made from scrap 40 years ago is cool and all, but it's been over 25 years since he's bothered to have it set up, it was always finicky to get running true, I've never suffered for a lack of using it.
If I ever move stuff like the tools and the lumber, I want it to be the very last time it ever happens -- and then I never want to see it again.
The China is particularly daunting: For as long as that stuff has been sitting around on display at their house, it has been both too nice to ever use and also too good to get rid of. (If the time ever comes that I want my own set of nice China for whatever reason I might, then: It's easy to get.)
I will work hard to dissuade anyone else from taking anything that is physically big, just on the basis that nobody needs that kind of curse in their life.
But I fear that others will find that a lot of this stuff will be too emotionally-precious to depart with. It will then be "temporarily" relegated to a storage facility until enough years go by that someone finally gets sick of paying the bill and it all gets sold to the highest bidder, thrown away, or donated anyway.
That expensive trip through purgatory seems like such a waste of money and effort.
My parents found one familiar, in particular, that wanted a huge (and extremely nice) china cabinet. After moving that, they put claim on more and more things. Great! Some neighbors also helped take things off their hands -- it would be great if they had a use for it, but I half think they were just taking things to be nice and help my parents; either to sell or dispose of later, which is also kind.
I'm so thankful that, in addition to making the smart move to move to a retirement home before it's too late, they also did the hard work of downsizing rather than leaving my sister and I with this chore a dozen years in the future. None of us have ever had a storage unit, although my parents just took on a "temporary"; I think 8x10ft unit. I know 2 things in there are for me, I just couldn't haul them in the one car trip I had time for. (and, unrelated, I'm living in a small apartment during construction on my house, so I don't have the space for a few more months).
I _do_ suspect that temporary storage unit will become relatively permanent, which is honestly probably the least-bad solution here. On the other hand, my parents are frugal and have lots of time on their hands, and probably opposed to storage units on principle, so we'll see :)
I also hate junk. If anything I own doesn't get used for more than a year, I'll sell it or trash it (with a few exceptions).
So the even the thought of paying a monthly fee to store junk gives me real anxiety.
Yes, one should donate/dispose what's never going to be needed, but the criteria have to be more discerning than a simple timeframe.
Sometimes I go through and throw a lot of stuff out. We have a reuse center in town where you can get that sort of cable for $2 so it is not like you have to pay Best Buy prices
I did say there were some exceptions to the rule.
I think more than anything this is the ooze you get out of the sides of societies that focus so terribly much on consumer culture. Advertising nowadays is absolutely incredible at driving the creation of what feels like "needs" in people. In my thirties I started transitioning to a woman, full time, and as a result I've bought and donated shit tons of clothes. This experience has made me realize how bizarrely attached I am to those clothes, and also to so many other things I own that I wouldn't have remotely called sentimental. Yet between growing up in a heavily consumerist society, and my environmental side, I feel so much regret and shame when simply throwing things away. Worthless things. Things my rational mind knows damn well I have no use for, that have no reason to exist in my home.
Mind you I'm someone who is familiar with facing down my inner demons. I can't fathom trying to deal with this if you're not someone like me who has gone to lengths to educate myself, to get therapy, and not only gone those lengths but had the resources to do so!
Then I watch hoarders and I see these old, broken down people who have massive, beautiful homes I would love to have, and they've stacked every room to the ceiling with... shit. Sometimes literally shit, but more often it's just junk. Things that were on sale. Each thing advertised to them, promised that it would make them the person they were meant to be, or to help them lose that weight they've been trying to lose for 50 years. That piece of furniture that would finally complete the room. And they did that on, and on, and on, and now their beautiful home is ruined, and most of the stuff is too. And oftentimes the person themselves are harmed too, with early onset illness and injury.
America needs to get our shit together. And worse still we've exported our disease in great quantity to the rest of the world, both as trash, and as the vacuous hollow culture that consumerism drives.
Once they are out of college and on their own though they need to figure out what to do about their stuff.
I also have all of the family antique furniture, some of which goes back three or more generations. I have no heirs and no idea what I'll do with it all, but I don't want to leave it for my executor to deal with. At least it's in the house and not in an expensive storage unit.
you're rounding out a 26 year military career and looking at retirement but are going to do one more 2-year stint in Norfolk/Missouri/Georgia/whatever and don't feel like selling your house -- storage unit
you work for a junior house rep who may not make it through the next election cycle, and since youre a staffer you can't afford anything larger than a shoebox, but still need to bring your stuff, some of which you can't fit -- storage unit
etc. etc.
There’s lots of military folks around here so maybe people are more likely around here to store stuff for a few years if they get deployed somewhere else and plan to move the family back after? I dunno.
I’ve used self-storage twice in my life: once in college over the summer before moving into a new apartment the next school year and once when we had our first child about a year before moving to a new city and larger house, which let us make room for baby stuff while keeping things we’d use when we had more space.
The answer is: cash flow. Self-storage businesses are the almost perfect solution for someone with a good size (but not enormous) bucket of money that they want to put to work generating cashflow:
1. Cheap build out (cheap land, cheap facilities) 2. Almost entirely hands-off (no employees, automated entry) 3. Low liability (low risk of customers suing you) 4. Low overhead (just pay for taxes, electricity, minimal maintenance) 5. Reliable monthly cash flow
The abundant supply of these businesses, I suspect, tends to generate demand: it's easier to pay $80/month to store your junk than spend the time and emotional labor of picking through what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. That ends up being captive long-term revenue.
My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year. Choosing storage over that seems harder.
When I've had storage units and spent time there, and saw open doors and what people had in theirs, I stand by my take.
The whole point of the article posted above was that it's a bit weird how numerous and prevalent self-storage has gotten in the US.
Aka, trash by proxy.
Best to look up what people actually need. There is a lot of this junk we collect that just gets junked by the donation groups turning into a cost center.
If you move often enough within a small radius, you will highly value your storage unit. It's not necessarily just a place for junk. Many people rotate their things when their apartment lease is up or even seasonally. If you live near water, you might even store a boat. Many facilities also offer RV storage. Personally, when I had roommates I would keep my most important stuff in there instead of at home.
The attacks against storage units are engagement bait for nerds about a non-story.
It happened with crypto and it happened with AI. Now that we're back to the usual boring topics it's happening to the most random trivia.
Basically any opinion from the top 100 youtubers will be parroted here on HN. In the past few years, it's been a whole lot of urban planning stuff because of the changes in the real estate market.
Where I live in Norway the recycling station is open three days a week and I can take stuff there free as often as I like up to 2 000 kg of stuff per year.
It has never occurred to me that there would be a limit on the number of visits. Or have I misunderstood?
Clearly this is madness, but it does make it a lot easier to throw shit out than put it in a storage unit.
It's like these people can't think two steps ahead (I'd go so far as to say that's the defining feature of regulatory policy in this state). You just gave people a financial incentive to litter and dump.
Most of the US East coast has no such excuse.
Are you serious? Here in NH it's either once or twice a year. I call it "The real Father's Day" and plan to have a couple of podcasts or similar queued up for the wait in line.
Making hazardous waste disposal inconvenient seems like a good way to have it end up in the normal waste stream.
https://affald.kk.dk/affaldsfraktion/saadan-sorterer-du-farl...
This is exactly what often happens
Good god! Why on earth would you make it difficult to dispose of hazardous waste safely?
Here in Blighty, the local tip (sorry 'recycling centre') is open throughout the week and accepts everything from used engine oil and battery acid to asbestos. Granted some of the smaller tips might not have such facilities, but they will direct you to one that will.
All free of charge for non-commercial users. (Business will have their own regulated arrangements for hazardous goods).
In theory, there is also an annual wait limit to free dumps, but they can't actually enforce it.
Many things invoke "but this is a perfectly good..." I had a LaserJet monochrome printer. I knew I would never use it because I now have a color model, and if the color one broke I would replace it immediately. "But this is a perfectly good printer." It sat for a few years on a shelf before I finally tossed it. Resale nets too little to be worthwhile.
Other things represent work. This is old files in the office. My workplace was full of file cabinets with drawers of papers. It was decades of accumulated knowledge. No one would ever read them or use them. But throwing them away seemed disrespectful of all the work that went into those papers. For these things, I think of my daughter's math homework. It is extremely valuable and lots of work went into it, and there is zero reason to retain it the instant it comes home.
Other things represent memories. They embody a long friend or lost relative, or a vacation, or an occasion, or a feeling they caused when worn, used, etc. Discarding it seems to disrespect the memory. I try to keep these things to a minimum - keep representative samples, and digitize to the extent possible.
This is why discarding things is hard. I don't want storage space and have none, but I completely understand why people would rather shove apparently useless things into a storage locker. It's easier to pay to store it than to discard it. I go a step farther and say that it's worth it for folks to pay to store these things. It's worth $80/month or whatever it costs to have that stuff sitting in a storage box, even if they know they will never ever use or even look at them.
About memories - throwing away the associated item often feels like admitting that you can't go back to the moment represented by the item. It's hard to face that small grief so it's easier to keep it there.
If your family is seriously considering moving to a bigger house, and that move is going to cost you $20,000 that makes renting a storage unit for $1000/year sound like a great deal.
Obviously true. If one had a house with space for posessions, there would be no need for storage. As houses become ever smaller (for a given $/sqft) external self-storage becomes the only affordable way to gain some space.
My parents were poor but back ~70 years ago it was still achievable for a lower income family to buy a house with some space. As an engineer in Silicon Valley, the largest house I can afford is barely twice the square footage of my childhood bedroom. In such a tiny house we fit 3 people, all with hobbies and equipment, child has toys, etc. A house with enough space would be another million at the very least. So that's impossible.
So compared to that, a couple hundred a month for self-storage is a bargain. I hate it, would rather have the equity in a larger property but it is impossible to afford.
So yes, that's why storage facilities have such a boom. Housing by $/sqft is impossibly expensive.
Like you shove your winter PPE, your emergency stash of spare parts for process equipment, etc, etc, in some self storage lockers and get the same job done using less square footage with extensive compliance burden (or get more job done using same square footage).
Go to one of theses facilities at 7 am, and you will almost always see a few contractors packing the truck with whatever they need for the day.
This is also why some startups trying to revolutionize the self storage model had extreme headwinds - if you are renting the underlying properties and trying to make the storage business profitable you are at an extreme disadvantage to the larger players who can subsidize operating costs with portfolio appreciation.
The whole reason why the Catholic Church doesn't allow priests to be married anymore was because it used to be that the individual churches were mostly the property of the priest, and would be passed down generationally (with some restrictions). The church phased in the ban on marriage so that over time, the churches would all in up in the estate of a priest with no heirs, where they'd become the property more formally of the Catholic Church proper. Today the Catholic Church is the single largest landowner in the world, with about 170 million acres.
More recent religious organizations have taken note of that, with LDS owning about 2.4M acres.
From my readings, one can always debate whether this reason for celibacy is whole or not (of course, more holy reasons were given, like purity of the ritual among others), but avoiding inheritance from father to sons was certainly a big factor. By barring heirs from the equation, it solved the whole dispute over inheritance. Yet, when it comes to clerical office and priesthood, "property" is not quite right, since it's mostly about usufruct and benefices, moreso. Which can be significant assets, that goes without saying, hence the Church did everything it could, for holy and not-so-holy-reasons, that traditional generational transmission does not apply. No next generation, no problem.
Quite importantly to the Roman Catholic Church, they wanted to avoid dynasties of priests that would grow in importance and out of their control, so they did whatever they could (ban marriage and fatherhood) so that a mis-aligned priest would only be a temporary nuisance to the Institution.
A lot went into this short burst of investigation, like the fact that early Churches were private property of land-owners, building churches for indulgences and power, reinforcing their ties with the Church, and I may dig deeper. Thanks for your comment again, if you have some references you recommend, I'd appreciate you share them!
If you mean I did, yes, I have, to begin with, to get an overview and links. But to do any of the reading or to write my comment? No. What's wrong with that?
Not that I think McDonald's will ever really find themselves in a pinch, but if they did, they would additionally be able to liquidate selected properties for cash. When you are rich enough, the promise of having money in the future is just as good as actually having money. It doesn't work like that for most of us, but that's the nature of risk assessment in finance.
Most restaurants in Europe generate an average of 250k in net cash flow per average restaurant, that's few years of work before ROI.
McDonalds's Corp, the landlord, is in a better position but they also don't want to see stores fail, it's bad for their image.
As long as home ownership declines, storage facilities will continue to flourish. There may be a blip when all the boomer downsizing demand evaporates as their kids will trash the junk.
(Car wash usage doesn't go down even during a recession, apparently).
Where I live, summer rain doesn't really clean the car (if that's what you care about), and in the winter you are shortening your cars life by years if you don't try and get the salt off regularly.
I bought the car. It easily lasted another 7 years before it died in a collision.
My car prior was a purely Midwest car, and I rarely washed it. It happily lasted 16 years. I passed it on to someone else, and he used it for a few more years.
I suspect the fear is overblown.
I used to think everyone does it, I will do at some point but that point never came. Inside we vacuum and wipe every few months. Washed mats once in an year or so but car body wash rain takes care of it.
I'm 62, and grew up near Detroit. I remember cars developing major rust holes after just a few years. The rusting also affected the inside of the engine compartment, and it did make repairs more difficult. There was an industry of aftermarket rustproofing shops, that were a scam. Every teenager with a car (which was still rare) learned how to patch rust holes with Bondo.
My first car, the frame rusted out and had to be welded back together.
Toyota and Honda put a stop to that. They did a number of things: Better steel alloys, better coatings, painting the bodywork before it could start rusting, eliminating places in the body where water could accumulate, etc.
Today, you rarely see totally rusted out cars on the road.
But it really didn't make a difference to the longevity of the car. Sure, occasionally a repair was a tad more expensive, but that's it.
The salt from the road is driven by car tires into a briny mist that coats everything. It blocks vision through windows. It accumulates in chunks that can be kicked (like mud also can, except corrosive). It wicks its way into tiny crevices and betwixt layers and infects every part of the car that can be infected, and once there it rots everything that it can rot.
And I don't mean just the bodywork; that part has been getting better with improved processes and paint.
But stamped control arms often rust away while the ball joints and bushings are still in good form. Electrical connections rot. Frames and frame-like components often have scaly holes in them. Every exposed engine part corrodes; uncoated steel turns black, red, or brown; galvanized and aluminum parts turn white and kind of fuzzy (and stuck). Our junkyards are full of rusted-out hulks of cars with drivetrains that still work properly, even if they're ugly.
Fixing things when they break is tedious and time-consuming, and the most-sane approach to any repair on a car that's more than a few years old is to go into it with an expectation everything that doesn't crumble from rust is instead frozen with rust.
The work itself unilaterally causes a person a learn new facets of their verbal and mechanical vocabulary that they never even knew possible, and is arduous in ways that would test the emotional stamina of a Buddhist monk.
With enough cleaning and care (and just rinsing things off by driving in the rain), a car that is from the midwest can be largely saved. Getting rid of all of the salt slows the process down very dramatically.
But a car that is regularly driven in the midwestern winter is in the midst of a fairly quick process of being returned to the earth.
It's just a fact that is plain and that we live with every day. We do work to prevent it; on a warm-ish day in January, cars will line up around the block to get into a car wash and have a chance to dry out before ice freezes every orifice closed.
But it's not fear, I don't think. Just as we accept the sun coming up every day and disappearing over the opposite horizon every night, we accept the rot as something that will inevitably consume the most expensive machine that we own and that this will happen on a schedule that we play very little part in.
From a certain perspective, maybe some people don't care if they would be getting rid of the car in like 5 years, but if you do want to keep a car 15 years and you live in "salt country" I would strongly suggest doing something about the salt regularly.
My first car spent its first 15 years in the Midwest. No garage. Very irregular car washes (perhaps once a year when I owned it). It lasted about 20 years total. When I lived there, I didn't know anyone who had to give up a car due to rust. There definitely was rust, but not something that caused the car to break down.
It looks better the more well-used and beat up it is.
Car wash is the only legal way to use soap, for better or worse.
And rarely. There is unfortunately a dirth of trees in my area since I live in a small farming town.
There are some evil trees that will make your car sticky after rain if you have to park under them, for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nikXsAW12Wo
I'm convinced they do this because the kids using student loans aren't paying attention.
Started at $87/month for a 5x10 unit. Plenty of space, and I added a six-foot-tall shelving unit ($50 from Home Depot) to keep it organized and access stuff when needed.
We’ve had it for maybe 18 months now, and I just realized it’s $204/month for the last 6 months.
It’s at the top of my list to eliminate this storage unit within the next few months.
We also had a 12 month personal limit on how long we’d keep it, but life happens.
1) Buying land and getting it rezoned for storage and then selling it on -- it's getting harder to get permits to build storage as people get sick of them, so there is a whole economy in knowing how and where to build them and only dealing with the paperwork.
2) Storage unit construction is a huge business now.
Sell the shovels in the gold rush etc.
It's infuriating... I dump stuff all the time... I probably have like 50 things in my life including t-shirts, which obviously contributes to my enragement.
If you have anything in storage you should look at it at least once a year to decide if it is worth saving. It is okay to say that "I love this thing from Grandma even though I don't have room for it", but you need to decide it is still worth it.
Unfortunately, I am now paying for two storage units for my mother-in-law's garbage. I wish we could just hire a junk truck to haul it all out; maybe someday...
tl;dw - As far as businesses go, they require low capital to construct, have low operational costs, and also operate as a way to hold real estate/land while also generating revenue.
The people that use them are usually dealing with some life event such as moving, a death in the family, divorce, and just want some solution to house possessions.
The 4 Ds of self storage: Death, divorce, dislocation, downsizing
This is AI slop.
Consumerism is a disease, and the USA is super good at it.
E.g. if you have a bunch of junk, how much would you pay for an extra closet to hide it from view?
At what point does the storage costs outweigh the value of the items?
I've heard stories of people who developed the habit of keeping virtually everything out of living through the Great Depression.
If by frugality you mean something more along the lines of minimalism then I agree
> An estimated 19.1% of U.S. adults had any anxiety disorder in the past year.
[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...