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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Did I say that? Since they failed, they were obviously bad business. But they were a rational thing to attempt to do - taking on a massive loan to speculate on land and using a (potentially) high cashflow, quick to setup, easy to market business to offset the high initial interest rates. i.e. the same thing being discussed in this thread
FWIW “Gambit” without elaboration strongly invokes the “the bankrupcies were on purpose” to me, so, did you say it? Strictly no, but it was very suggestive.
Eh. I wanted to be provocative because I've heard a lot of educated but economically naive people assume 'highly leveraged hotel-casino project' is dumb a priori, even though it's (an example of a) a sensible and common business strategy available to the wealthy. I didn't mean to imply bankruptcy was intentional though.
As to whether Trump did this better or worse than others, I have no idea as I haven't studied it but would assume the latter given the outcome.
A certainty though - plenty of undeserving people you would consider contemptible have successfully played this hand many a time. Yet more reasons to tax land
A rational thing for a competent person to attempt. Given the theoretical structural advantages of the idea, the 6 failures are even more embarrassing than failing at something that was actually a bad idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I live in New York, which is heavy handed with salt. Paints and alloys are better, but there’s basically a 250k and about 10 year lifespan for a car that lives upstate.
The frame, exhaust and suspension generally get corroded and start to fail. You see a lot of 200k Civics and Accords, but few 250k.
You really notice it when traveling to California. Last time I was in SFO with my son, he counted 78 Porsche 911s and about 100 “old” (80s or older) cars on the roads.
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 controlling.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Not sure if it's the same in Canada, but where I am from the problem is the oil (lubricant and fuel) from the car and at car washes the runoff gets treated by letting it go through an oil trap.
The trapped oil gets disposed of separately, the treated oil-free water goes to the sewer.
AFAIK the regulations were put into place to prevent untreated water from going into storm drains and into the water system, so presumably the cities are fine if you pour it down into the bathtub drain and let it go to the waste water treatment plants.
I appreciate the sentiment, but is the gunk on the car not the gunk that would have washed down the drains in the first place? Clearly there are plenty of nasty cleaning agents, but one supposes that safe ones might be used (I actually spent a while considering exactly this, and it's possible but not super easy getting an environmentally friendly car cleaner). I guess the issue is it's hard to tell from mere drive-by observation what cleaner is being used.
Yeah that could be a concern depending where you live. Where I live, water is cheap and abundant. And I've never measured, but I would guess I use maybe 10 gallons to wash a car. 2 gallons in the bucket, and just a light wetting followed by soapy sponge and then a rinse, using a nozzle to create a high velocity spray. The water doesn't run at all unless I'm spraying it on the car.
Water is cheap and abundant where I live, too. If we have a problem with water in any normal year, it is usually that we have to deal with a surplus of it. (We put drainage tiles under our farm fields to get rid of excess water and generally don't even bother with irrigation systems at all.)
But car washes are interesting systems and one of the things that makes them interesting is that the water they use is (often) recycled. The same water gets reclaimed and re-used to wash cars over and over again.
I didn't look very deep at all, but one car wash chain suggests[1] a reclamation rate of 70%. Not perfect, but way better than 0.
You can probably match that efficiency at home by using an electric pressure washer. Mine does 1.2 GPM, which means an entire car wash is only a few gallons.
Yes. In the same way that dishwashers are an order of magnitude more water-efficient than washing by hand. (But consume a kilowatt of electricity heating the water and running the pump, which is the part that everyone always leaves out.)
You heat the water when you wash dishes by hand too, don't you? It's not very hygenic to do dishes with just cold water.
Given that by hand you use much more hot water than the dishwasher would, you're using more electricity (or gas). Since a little pump doesn't use much at all, it's mainly just the drying heat that matters. Though nobody is forced to use the drying cycle - if one enjoys drying dishes by hand, they can still use the dishwasher to do the washing.
In my house you don't heat the water but it's been sitting in a metal water tank at equitorial latitude for hours so is generally quite warm for evening dishes.
Is it safe? Not for a restaurant where the temps need to get to parasite killing temps to pass muster.. but if I had to guess, the odds of getting killed by a bad-tempered cow outweigh it by 10x.
You're assuming an absence of solar hot water heaters - the world isn't homogenous.
eg. Our household conserves water (we track every litre we bring up to the tanks and filter) and we don't have a dishwasher - hot water is heated by the sun and run-off goes to the grey water tank for the garden.
When my water heating was electric, switching to a dishwasher consistently led to lower electric bills compared to a year prior (confirmed for 12 whole months).
That's surprising. I once tried an automated car wash just to see what all the hullabaloo was about and I think the rain actually does a better job. Worst $5 I've ever spent...
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.
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.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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 solid waste bill, my municipality will let me set out up to 20 (!) bags of trash per week with up to 50 lb (!) in them every week. 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
Rebuying decorations every year is also a leak on finances. Rebuying a bunch of camping gear (more than I can comfortably store in my home) is also a leak on finances.
It's far cheaper to use a storage unit for a lot of this stuff I do routinely use than buying and selling a house just to get more storage space at home.
I'm not blind to the fact not everyone just stores junk they never use. I'm certain there's a percentage of stuff in mine that is probably better off sold or trashed. But until we stop changing decorations for the different seasons, stop a number of hobbies with bulky stuff, or move to a giant mansion I just don't have the space and could use a few more square feet of pure storage space.
So give up on hobbies and everything occasional that requires some equipment since they can’t keep it at home, so basically give up on things that make life worth living to a lot of people. Yeah nah.
Every square footage of every home costs $$$ to keep in your possession. I pay a mortgage. I pay insurance. I pay taxes. I pay maintenance costs. There were acquisition costs in the purchase of it, and there will be acquisition costs wherever I go next. Not one square inch of my home is "free".
Suddenly that simple answer isn't so simple when actually confronted with reality, unless you're willing to be homeless and just carry your possessions in your hands.
i think they are suggesting to rethink the need for things like seasonal decorations if you are forced to pay a life long recurring fee for the privilege.
> if you are forced to pay a life long recurring fee for the privilege.
I have to regardless of a storage unit or in a closet in my house. That closet in my home and that shelf in my garage isn't free either.
So then it's just a question of owning anything at all or nothing, because it all has a life long recurring fee for the privilege of continuing to own it. And yes, my family finds value in decorating for holidays as a part of celebrating, remembering, and keeping traditions alive.
Sometimes people don't just want to live in the same IKEA box 365 days a year.
No, I'm not, and I've also never rented a storage unit.
It seems hard to imagine the sums involved becoming comparable to other amounts of money lit on fire to avoid fights with family though (i.e. home renovation, travel).
Who tf is breaking the bank on subscriptions and phone bills?
Are all these comments like yours coming from college students or what? If anything else, a storage unit is one of the most valuable things to pay for if you just moved out on your own.
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).
I live in a small downtown condo. I don't have room to store a whole lot of extra stuff but I also have hobbies like camping, watersports, etc. I keep all of that stuff in a storage unit and I access it fairly often. Since I have it I also use it to save all the boxes for my electronics (77" OLED is impossible to move safely without original box for example), car maintenance stuff, larger tools I use less frequently, etc. It is about 3 minutes drive 10 minute walk from my house. I definitely do not use it to hoard stuff I will never touch again.
>77" OLED is impossible to move safely without original box for example)
Exactly same here - well curved super ultrawide. Without the curved box styrofoam it can't move. Though in hindsight it was a bad deal...at ~60 bucks a month I could have replaced the screen...
my 10 year old 75" TV cost me upwards of $70, probably $100, to move across town -- at the cost of the boxes and packing material and labor the movers provided.
When I move again in a few months I think I'll just throw it in the back of my SUV and hope it doesn't break.
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 tenant 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Near my house I saw two large blocky buildings being constructed on a main thoroughfare. Different construction companies, but within about 100 yards of each other.
"Fantastic!", I thought. New apartment buildings. That means new restaurants, stores, and other conveniences. Not to mention desperately-needed housing.
I'll never forget my despair upon learning that they were BOTH going to be large multi-level self-storage facilities.
Don’t dox yourself but this sounds just like Irvine, CA. It feels like every two years I see a new track of homes + block storage facilities being built
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.
These are slightly higher end, and from what I've seen they go for $2-3000. But still yes, it is ridiculous, and the company wont offer them for sale per the current contract! For convenience sake he'd rather pay the monthly fee than haul all his junk out, get them to pick the container up, buy new ones, and put all his cheap useless junk back in.
If only you knew my father and his distrust of most things. He's been watching 5+ hours of Fox News daily for 30+ years. There isn't much left in that mind.
Shipping container costs went up after covid, but still, at their peak you could buy one for ~$5k, $500/month is insane rental price especially if he never moves it.
I looked up prices for 40ft container: pre-covid: Under $2,000, Peak Pandemic (2020-2021): >$8,000; 2022-2024: prices falling, Current: $2,300
I can corroborate that. I once rented a “storage unit” on Treasure Island — the cheapest facility “in” San Francisco by far. It was just containers with plywood walls built inside them to create units.
My stuff all got wet from condensation and I threw away 90% of what we had in it. Lesson learned.
My friend got one for free, along with some miscellaneous office furniture inside of it (mostly useless, but some very solid pieces from the mid 1980s or so).
We use it as emergency shelter and camping supplies storage on his rural land.
The major pain of shipping containers is transporting it to its place of destination and not having the local municipality throw a fit about it (they really don't like unpermitted stuff).
Renting one for such long term seems like 10x worse than renting an internet router.
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
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).
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
We call these "above-ground landfills." After watching (and helping) my parents shuffle stuff around these facilities for years, we drew a hard line in our household: no external storage. If it doesn't fit in the space we live in, we're not keeping it. Great article!
> our household: no external storage. If it doesn't fit in the space we live in, we're not keeping it
This assumes you can afford a space to live in that has minimally adequate space to store necessary posessions.
In many areas that is nearly impossible, it would cost millions for a house that can have enough sqft to keep the basic minimum sport/hobby/inheritance things one needs.
My wife and I needed a storage locker due to a very slow house move along with her parents giving us some (wanted) furniture from their recent move. The spare bedroom we had been using as an office and storage space needed to be cleared out for a friend that was going to live with us for a bit. We just couldn't keep everything in our apartment and the house just wasn't ready for most of our stuff. I knew plenty of stories of people keeping storage units full of forgotten junk and I didn't want that happening with us. We made a promise to each other that we would get the unit empty within the month we finally could move into the house. The unit was of a decent size and only $20/month for the 2 or 3 months we had it so it was pretty inexpensive but we were pretty cash strapped at the time. The rate was going to jump up a lot more if we had kept it longer. We barely had enough to pay movers to help move the big stuff, we did all the small stuff ourselves. Intentionally, the storage unit was on the route between the apartment and house so it was easy to just pickup a few things at a time. Finally when it was time to move things in, we were able to get it done in about a week, right before the increased renewal rate was about to be charged. I was doing reno work for the landlord during this time so we technically had a house to live in but it's pretty annoying trying to live in a place while you're sanding drywall and replacing flooring.
Yeah I just don’t understand. I sold so much second hand furniture online. Each sale you get a little bit of adrenaline rush from a buyer handing you cash while you get rid of old stuff. (No adrenaline with electronic direct deposits.)
My idea for innovative self storage pricing: offer free month 1, $1 month 2, $2 month three, $4 month four and so on. Very soon it obviously will become untenable, and you will either stop paying and get your shit out of there.
I probably would be adversely selected by people who really only need a couple months of storage. But would force people to work against their instincts to store all their trash.
Storage space inevitably fills up with stuff. I have the stereotypical "garage too full of stuff to park the car in" but it's one side of a 2-car garage and the other side, and this the wife and I are in perfect agreement on, is reserved for the car.
Then I inherited a second car, which for various reasons is barely practical to keep while it works. It lives outside so that the stuff in the garage (a clutter of far too many bicycles, mostly) can stay accessible. But in winter, it is possible - barely - to park the car inside, with bicycles hanging only inches above it. Some stuff had to be disposed of to make this possible, and I fear some additional stuff will have to go this fall. But you have to set yourself limits or the stuff will grow infinitely.
Meanwhile premium locations all over town are sprouting Dymon Self Storage units. That's the local brand of "premium climate controlled storage". There's one less than a mile, as the crow flies, from my house.
I've always wanted to have a "shop" - a detached space, like a pole barn, where I could work on projects and store things. A lot of people I know in my life have such an arrangement and I'm occasionally jealous.
These days, I live on a large enough piece of land that I could pretty easily construct such a building. However, I've stopped myself because I've realized that I just fill up whatever space I have. If there's room to store something, you can just put it there and plan to deal with it later (of course, later almost never comes). I'm the type of person that has a hard time getting rid of things that I paid good money for or that have sentimental value, and as I get older I'm increasingly envious of those people who have less hesitation about throwing stuff out. For some things, selling is an option, but that has its own set of hassles.
I have a garage like you that has one stall full of stuff - family bikes, tools, a table saw, grill, etc. Stuff that we do use, though some of it is probably not used enough to justify the space it takes up. Every time I clean up the garage now I try to make a point to get rid of some things, though all that does is tend to break even with the new stuff that inevitably gets added.
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.
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.
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.
I was angered and frustrated to find (the hard way) that some states have statutes which explicitly relieve storage companies from responsibility in the event of loss from theft.
The entity in the best position to know how to secure the premises is not liable to do so at all in some states.
Oh, and don’t get me started on ballooning but opaque rental rates.
I wanted to pay up front for 2-3 years of storage but most places “couldn’t” quote me what the rate would be beyond 3 months in advance.
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.
My late father was a child during the depression era and so he grew up to be very resourceful/thrifty, hard working, and epitomized the "waste not, want not" slogan. So yes it can come off as hoarding and it was a lot to go through after he passed. Yet after a lifetime of scrimping, saving, reusing, and repurposing, he ended up with quite a lot to show for it. He never paid for storage, didn't clutter any open spaces, but every closet or spare room of his home was packed.
If you have the storage then by all means keep whatever you value. If it would require paying a recurring fee to keep it, then it better be worth it.
Even if you have the space I'd caution against it. Cleaning out my parent's house after my mother's death was a chore, and they weren't hoarders in the classic sense but they had a lot of stuff. Thousands of family photographs, in boxes, that had never been organized or put in albums. Clothing, in suitcases, that hadn't been worn in decades. Toys from my childhood. Furniture with almost zero resale value. It all went in a dumpster. It was emotionally draining to get rid of some of it because I had memories attached to it. The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it. Even after all that I probably ended up keeping too much of it. I now have several shelves in my basement with boxes from my parent's house, that I have never opened since bringing them home.
I have promised myself that I will not leave that kind of accumulated junk for my kids to sort through some day, but I honestly wonder if I will get around to doing my own purge. It hasn't happened yet.
> The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it.
I took the same lesson from clearing out my parents things. What I'm trying to do now is to clear out incrementally. Doing a full sweep is way too easy to defer to future me and therefore never happens, so I try to do a small amount regularly. My big box of cables (another recent thread here) is a rich source of material that will keep me busy for a while. Pretty sure nobody will appreciate going through that.
Also just trying to notice things around the place that I really don't need, books I'll never read again, boxes that have not been opened for years. A little bit at a time. Removing each one gives a small sense of achievement.
Relatable. In my case my dad passed away and at the time my relationship with him wasn’t the best. It wasn’t until I had a child of my own, about 5 years later, that I started to empathize with him orders of magnitude more - and to wish I had more of his things to help me feel closer to him. Sadly, I had kept almost none of it because I lived in a 1-bedroom condo in the city at that time and didn’t feel like I could spare any space for any of it.
> and to wish I had more of his things to help me feel closer to him
Yes. When one is young it is difficult to appreciate this, but later in middle age this becomes very precious. Store everything, your future self will be happier for it.
My grandfather was like this, grew up in the depression and fought in the pacific during ww2. His garage was full of coffe can after coffee can filled with random nuts and bolts. When I was a kid every meal with my grandparents was 50% leftovers and they had a giant garden. Waste not want not indeed.
I found soap decades old, very likely older than half a century. Hundreds of boxes and hence thousands of soap bars. I'd regularly found them for years and years here and there for my great aunt had stashed those left and right. I found some in system ceilings (!), in the attic, in the basement, in drawers.
My great aunt died years and years ago (RIP) but as recently as a few weeks ago my brother and I cleaned/emptied a garage where she had hidden some stuff.
More soap bars.
I don't need the physics/chemistry: I know that soap is a stable molecule. I suspect some of the soap bars were dating back to WWII.
My great aunt was also in the "waste not / want not" camp. But as she lived through WWII as a teenager, she was in fear of ever missing things again. Hence the soap bars.
I definitely make a point of keeping a small stock TP (and cheap/easy food, like bologna, hot dogs, and bread) around in these post-covid days.
Not to the extreme of the story about the soap, above, but: Something in my mind was changed a little bit more every time I'd go to the store and there were empty shelves. So now I do things like always have a few weeks of TP, and I freeze things like bread and bologna.
I never did that at any point in my adult life leading up to COVID: If I ran out of something, I just picked up more later at the store the next time I was nearby (or any other time; lots of things were 24/7 back then).
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.
I suspect this is highly variable between people. I can imagine kids who would be deeply attached to their stuff, deeply apathetic and want nearly none of it, and a few who would think they wanted a lot of it and yet would realize it wasn’t a big deal to them.
Only tough part is determining which one they’ll be!
If it were me as the college student though, I would find it fair if a summer were declared the Summer Of Claiming Your Crap, and all stuff that I actually wanted had to be in designated storage bins that I’d commit to come retrieve after college, and the rest would be donated.
Donating it without consulting me would have seemed like a betrayal, no matter whether I actually needed it.
This must be a generational issue. My kids took “their” things with them when they became autonomous adults. As parents, we raised our children that they would move out and establish their own identities and futures. We never created any expectation that their childhood home would serve as a storage facility, extended stay facility or even exist. We of course offer help and support when needed.
I know this is in conflict with a lot of modern parenting for many reasons. Our primary goal was to create independent, autonomous, fully functional adults capable of funding their own lives and determining their own future.
Kind of hard to take my stuff when I was attending college and then working clear on the other side of the country.
Other than renting a U-Haul and driving 2,800 miles, there weren’t many options. Which I even suggested, to which my parents insisted they were happy to hang on to the stuff until it was easier to do the handover.
>never created any expectation that their childhood home would serve…facility, extended stay facility or even exist.
Sounds like a pretty sad mindset to me. Between me and your kids, I wonder which are happier to visit their parents?
I once, in a divorce, sent at least two carloads (about 25 average size boxes) of personal belongings across the country by UPS. It cost like $600. If you’re a grown-up and settling somewhere after college, I think it’s a cool move to take your crap off your parents’ hands by shipping it to yourself when you’re home and at least blessing the disposal of the rest.
I get that some people even at 25, think they haven’t got a so-called “permanent address” except Mom and Dad’s (and I’m not being derisive, I have dear friends who felt like that), but none of us have a permanent home and I think it’s best if we mentally think of ourselves as not being “only temporarily here” as early in life as practical.
I somewhat expected my post would generate this type of attack and then lead to my parenting style is better than years, my kids are more successful than yours, my kids are happier to visit us than you, ad nauseam.
Parenting is hard and there are multiple approaches that lead to successful outcomes. Your approach worked and I am happy for you. Congratulations on your successful approach.
>I know this is in conflict with a lot of modern parenting for many reasons. Our primary goal was to create independent, autonomous, fully functional adults capable of funding their own lives and determining their own future.
This heavily implies that the children of other "modern" parents are dysfunctional adults. As they say "to throw the stone and hide the hand". The funnier thing is that your parenting style is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon.
There is no implication here. It is clearly stated as "Our primary goal", not your primary goal. You are reading way too much into this.
I agree it is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon, but not sure what is funny about it. Societies and systems constantly change and evolve. This is part of progress, and yes, can also cause setbacks.
My use of the term "conflict" might be what is triggering. Maybe "bucks the trend" or "not in line with" would be better.
Many approaches to parenting are successful. I presented my approach. Others work.
Now you're characterizing what you've done as progress, to defend characterizing it as opposed to modern parenting, and you anticipated attacks from other people. I'll tell you why I think you anticipated attacks after I tell you a reason why I disagree.
I agree that it has been a generational thing. It was called the "Me Generation." Me, me, me. In the animal kingdom, parents abandoning their children to be completely independent is mostly common among insects, lizards, and amphibians, and is associated with large litters and a massive death rate among them. It's not modern, it's a feature of creatures that are lower than mammals.
What's triggering is the fact that you've decided to brag about your superior parenting in public, and claim the evidence of that is that you have told your children that you're done with them. Nobody asked you, and you're aware that normal people don't do that to people that they are close to (hence the need to lecture.) Everybody raises their children to have the ability to be completely independent and self-sufficient. You just think you're uniquely successful at that, and that it somehow would be the child's fault if you've failed.
Your kids didn't ask to be born, and if you don't rescue them from their failure (at least initially), it will be a reflection on you. If we are in the same social circles, and I know about this, I will judge you. Even hearing you explain it, and your feigned confusion (I guarantee you have this conversation all the time), would make me wary of hiring you into a management position.
I'm not a lizard. I want everybody I care about to be self-sufficient, and I also don't want them to try to be unless they actually have to be. They have resources available to them that are not always being fully utilized, and when those resources can give them an advantage in any context, I would be angry if they weren't used.
There are always limits to self-sufficiency, because there are massive advantages to abandoning it: that's what we call civilization.
Very good points. Thanks for the insight and critique. There is a reason I don't wade into social topics and usually only comment on technical things I have worked on and this is helping me understand why!
> I somewhat expected my post would generate this type of attack
It may not have been your intention but your post had a combination of a somewhat smug, lecturing tone and patting oneself on the back which is a bit off-putting. And implicitly made a lot of assumptions about other parents' intentions/lived experience raising their children based on a single factor that's pretty insignificant like # of sq ft of child's belongings kept in the family home.
Also, for all you knew at the time you replied, OP could've still had stuff in their parents' attic because they joined the Marines at 18 and was even more independent than your own kids. There was a lot of projection onto a trivial story.
Plus "must be a generational issue" just sounds like more of the same "my generation was responsible/good/normal unlike kids these days" meme that gets repeated by every generation as they age and is tiresome to hear as an explanation for everything.
Honestly telling your kid going off to college (or elsewhere) "you have to take everything from you care about, the rest is going to go away" seems like a good way to stunt their independence. The natural reaction would be to take as much as they can of their current life, which is then going to be a burden preventing them from growing into a new life.
When you put it this way, it is very anxiety inducing and I understand that. What this is helping me realize is that my childhood, and our lives of our children were different than many of the commenters, not necessarily better or worse.
As children, my siblings and I didn't have a lot of stuff, and our family didn't have a lot of stuff either. It certainly wasn't our intent to traumatize and stunt our children and this doesn't seem to be the case. I will certainly ask them.
What stuff do you have that is worth keeping that wouldn’t fit in one or two storage totes. I would think anything of sentimental value like pictures, art, trophies, books, paperwork etc would be quite small.
When I was moving into a dorm, a few totes would have been a lot of my available space. I'm pretty glad my parents would let me pick and choose before clearing stuff out. Saving my childhood stuffed animals or favorite books so I can share them with my own kids someday is pretty meaningful to me, same thing I remember my parents doing. I don't know if I would have had the correct perspective to make those choices as a university freshman. Unless you immediately downsize after becoming an empty nester you're going to have way more storage space than you need anyways.
As a father of 3 kids under 5, we bought our house 2.5 years ago and it has appreciated so much that had we saved every penny for the last 2.5 years we couldn't have afforded it today.
It doesn't matter how high performing your kids are if no good opportunities exist. So while we hope the world will allow our independent, high performance kids to succeed on their own, we're planning on having to provide unique opportunities via resources/connections ourselves to make that happen. Accordingly we're treating our house as something of a family estate, to be held in perpetuity and they can live in as long as it's good for them. It's not about keeping them as forever-children, it's about providing a base with a secure perimeter from which they can marshal their resources. For instance, we're right in the middle of two major metros. So if they land an unpaid/underpaid but prestigious internship in one of them, they won't have to worry about housing.
A very interesting and valid observation. You and your children are super fortunate and your approach seems like a very good hedge against some serious uncertainty coming up.
We weren’t quite in the same position until much later, and I am somewhat envious of your position. Best of luck!
Likewise, and I wasn't trying to invalidate your approach. Raising independent kids who understand the imperative of building their own lives is absolutely necessary regardless of economic conditions
Growing up, actual peak existence was visiting Grandma's house and playing with my mom's old toys. The seemingly unlimited, completely novel hoard from another time. My son feels similarly about visiting my parents' house and playing with my old toys. This may or may not be sustainable but it seems like it is well on its way with four generations involved- from where I stand, keeping a good pile of consumerism around to pay it forward in 20 years doesn't seem out of proportion with the joy I've received. It's definitely a culture thing- nobody in my family tree seems to move much, and has decent taste in throwing out the actual trash and keeping stuff stored nicely over the long time gaps, then not being fussy about the next generation being pretty hard on stuff (within reason, as appropriate for their age)
> My kids took “their” things with them when they became autonomous adults.
College students both are and are not autonomous adults. It's not really practical to bring all your stuff to college housing, and you don't always graduate into a good job market where you can go directly to the workforce and a nice place where all your stuff fits. Not everyone can afford to, and that's fine, but if you can give your kids an easier transition to full autonomy, it seems reasonable.
If moving while the kids are in college, it's nice to keep their stuff somewhere.
You're right that this is a generational thing, but the expectation for your kids to move out like this is also relatively recent: historically it was a lot more common for your children to continue to live with you, or if not, to live very nearby. Arguably one of the biggest reasons for the modern birthrate dropping is that lack of local family ties to help with childcare.
(And yeah, for college this just isn't practical: college accommodation is temporary, tiny, and students have practically no money. Taking all your stuff with you to college is a lot of effort for very little gain).
Yeah. My mom hung onto my old school stuff and finally wanted to get rid of it when she moved. I took it graciously with thanks, and then tossed it in the trash when I got home.
Probably not - but it isn't his decision, and the kids are not yet in a place in life where they can make the decision.
Until the kids figure out where their life will take them they can't know. I have some heirlooms that I'm really glad to have now, but when I was in college living in dorms I wouldn't have had space for them.
You have no clue what somebody else finds important and will throw the wrong things.
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.
This is a difference in parenting approaches. For our kids, going to college, or in one case the military and another no college, was moving out. You have your approach, we had ours. They were perfectly capable and successful in figuring out their lives without flying back to the nest every summer.
Great that you and your kids had this privilege. A lot of college grads these days struggle to get a job, let alone one that pays enough to rent their own place not one shared with roommates. Honestly, your replies sound very condescending and tone-deaf.
I agree and understand part of what you are saying. I am not exactly sure what the privilege was, but I do understand your observation about the tone-deafness. It is for certain that current job outlook seems bleak and this is extremely difficult. In general, I admit I am very privileged in that I was able to live in a time when certain types of jobs were plentiful and there seemed to be limitless opportunities available to me.
My mom kept most of my books but threw out a rare box of Creative Computing magazines that all the world’s libraries wrongly decided were ephemeral crap.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
As a data point, I counted all of the chairs at my parents' house. 44. 44 chairs. We thought it was hilarious, so we told my in-laws, and they counted chairs at their own home -- also 44!
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.
The Silent Generation had a standard of living, particularly among the working classes and rural folk, well below what millenials/GenZ are used to. They kept stuff, took good care of it to make it last as long as they could, jury-rigged things with what they could to conserve money, and so forth. No ordering cheap stuff from Temu, no electrical devices so cheap that they're disposable, no fast fashion, none of that. That submitter recently who broke apart a book for their own convenience probably would have been soundly thrashed for it. So, yeah, of course, at the end of their lives they wind up with a pile of worn out household items and what their grandchildren view as a hoarding problem. But one can hardly blame them.
We live in an era of immense wealth and convenience relative to them.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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).
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.
For most of human history, children very much would appreciate inheriting crafted goods. The kind of rampant, commoditized consumerism where we routinely snub our noses at and throw away perfectly useful goods is a rather recent trend.
For most of human history, children and parents lived together or close by, and parents died earlier in the child's life. If your parents died and left you an heirloom dining room table, it was quite likely you just didn't have a table, and at most you lived a few blocks away, so acquiring it was easy.
I'm in my 40s. Both my parents are alive, and have a house full of stuff. I live in a different house, 3.5 hours away at highway speeds, full of different stuff. It doesn't really matter to me if my parent's dining room table is a nicely crafted table - I have a nice table, and I don't need two dining room tables. Getting it to my house is a tremendous hassle. Picking between them is a tremendous hassle. And then I still have all the other stuff - the hutch, the chairs, the couches, the beds - and only one sibling to split them with.
"Rampant, commoditization consumerism" didn't cause this, longevity, freedom of movement, and independent living caused this, and I wouldn't trade those away for an heirloom table.
My parents aren't leaving me any crafted goods when they pass.
They had beautiful, carved wooden dressers and wardrobes from their parents that they, naturally, did not appreciate and take care of, so they turned into garbage and were thrown away when they became too dilapidated to move to another building. They were replaced with the standard fare particle-board-and-laminate Ikea-type trash that I definitely do not want. It's falling apart already and they've only had it a few years.
If they had maintained the furniture they were given by their parents, I would love to keep them around in my home and give them to my children when I pass, too. But I don't want cheap, mass-produced garbage from my parents simply because it belonged to my parents.
For most of human history we were riddled with parasites and children would appreciate being less riddled with parasites.
My wife and I are both the youngest in our families, and all of our extended family uses us as a dumping ground for stuff to they're too guilty to throw away or donate. About 10% of the time it's something actually useful, 90% we already have a better version of whatever it is or simply don't want or need it.
No, I'm not taking my father in law's perfectly good TV. I have a TV, and the one he bought was mediocre at best when it was new.
Here's a secret. If you have family members that you know struggle to throw stuff away, and they offer it to you, just take if their hands and dispose of it yourself.
It violates people's internal sense of morality in a strangely strong way to do that for whatever reason. It's a white lie but ultimately it's an act of kindness to take the electronic intercom from RadioShack that your father is pretty sure "just needs a new rheostat"
> No, I'm not taking my father in law's perfectly good TV. I have a TV, and the one he bought was mediocre at best when it was new.
Look, I'm not saying there aren't reasons for it. Obviously the economic value of a TV is now low. If you're posting on HN, chances are you can afford a new TV in a day's work, which may be less overhead than storing a TV for when you or someone else might need it in the future. At the same time, this is a historical abnormality. A television is a miracle device made with extremely advanced, relatively speaking, technology. 50 years ago, it would have been insane to snub your nose at that. To you it's a disposable good, to an older generation there is no reason to view it as such (and, I'd argue, this cultural value of disposability that is being forged is extremely bad and not actually sustainable for our society long-term).
All very true, but doesn't change the fact that my dad's house is more than 1000 sqft bigger than mine and when he goes I will have literally no place to put his stuff.
The point of the article is that most of what's being left is low economic value. When my great aunt died she had a collection of painted glass/plaster birds (not by any famous artist or anything, just mass produced stuff) that had been sitting in display cabinets for decades and nobody wanted.
It isn't an artifact of modernity that people don't want stuff like that. And as for stuff that is an artifact of modernity, the generation entering their 80s today lived through the widespread adoption of color TV, the moon landings, the space shuttle, cable TV, mainframes, PCs, CDs, VHS, DVDs, the internet, cellphones, smartphones, and freaking microwaves, never mind all the advancements in autos. You'd think someone with that lived experience would understand that times change and their kids might not want all their old stuff for the same reason it's been sitting unused in their garage/basement for decades.
My diagnosis is it was boomers who wrote the script for "The Goonies", specifically the line "Goonies never say die!". They came up in an era where rampant consumerism was encouraged and even directly subsidized as a political policy, hell it was how we beat the commies! Hard to be a good consumer past a certain point if you're too aware of your own mortality.
Well for most of human history if you inherited something you inherited the building that contained that stuff. And the industry around it that used that stuff.
These days the inheritance will include mostly junk. Old, worn out, low quality items, clothes, furniture, appliances, etc. Nobody says no to the one thing they need but can't afford, they say no to having yet another item they have no need for and its only value could be sentimental but otherwise it's a burden, one other thing among many to store somewhere, or throw out/donate/sell.
Do you need and can afford to keep somewhere another 6 creaky chairs, a big worn out dining table, bags of old clothes that don't fit anyone, outdated and broken electronics that probably don't work anymore, and so on? Even memories like pictures and videos are sometimes too much. They used to be a couple of photo albums, half with people you wouldn't even recognize, now there are TB of digital ones.
When I moved to a big city from a medium sized town I had to put some stuff in storage while we lived in a small apartment and searched for a house to purchase. My bbq, lawn mower, other random stuff. Two months later I went to the office to move out and they couldn't find the paperwork. No one does that!
I rented one of these for a while after my wife and I moved in together. After a bit, I realized what we had paid for it was close to exceeding the value of the items stored within .
Just get rid of your stuff when you can. Life will be better.
Macys went out of business in Sacramento. In a built up area, near a movie theater grocery store mall etc. The best thing that could fill this multi floor space in a developed area is a storage unit.
I've seen a few American self storage units on Youtube and a lot of times their units are open at the top. Which blows my mind. All it takes is for one bad customer to setup a ladder and just loot whatever unit they want.
> A self-storage facility is a business that rents lockable space to people who own more stuff than they know what to do with
This has turned into another topic where people look down upon others or culture in general while assuming the worst.
Self-storage facilities can be really nice for those of us who like to live in areas where larger houses or garages aren't easy options. I can put the winter gear in there during the summer and the summer gear in there during the winter. If I need to renovate a part of the house, I can rent a storage unit for a few months and move that room's contents into it and free up space. When an older family member passes away and the estate needs to sell the house, moving the important belongings into a storage unit while the family works on dividing them up or selling them is something that happens all the time.
I don't currently have a unit, but when I was making a lot of trips to the self-storage place there were a lot of people doing all the things I mentioned above. I'm sure there are a lot of units with forgotten and unnecessary things that are basically hoarded because their owners can't let go, but I have to roll my eyes at articles that talk about it like an "American religion".
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 even the thought of paying a monthly fee to store junk gives me real anxiety.
Since when does Netflix cost only $6? Anyhow, I am sorry but your logic of "trashing what's not used for a year" is extremely aggressive, unreasonably so. 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 too.
Yes, one should donate/dispose what's never going to be needed, but the criteria have to be more discerning than a simple one year limit. I think ten years is a better limit, although I easily have worthwhile unused items going back further.
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.
> 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 but that young people for some time have referred to derisively as “brown.”
This is madness talking. A nice "brown" bookcase or dresser is made of solid wood and will last your entire life. The alternative these days is either insanely priced and still of questionable quality or cheap, badly constructed particleboard that outgasses formaldehyde and other toxins into your home and needs to be replaced every few years.
There used to be a much larger amount of inexpensive high quality furniture on the second hand market, but now its harder to find locally. If you have kids who are allergic to the color brown, you should donate any good furniture you have. Someone will absolutely want it.
>larger amount of inexpensive high quality furniture on the second hand market,
There is no second hand market, it's just a used primary market.
Before the invention of the internet getting rid of second hand items meant tossing it, or selling it at a garage sale, or for more expensive things taking out an (pretty expensive) ad in the paper. This had a lot of friction. Sellers also had any real idea of what their items were worth. Stuff ranged from wildly expensive to impossibly cheap.
The internet broke this. If I post something too cheap, in seconds a bot picks it up and a person that retails stuff buys it up. Then 30 minute later you find the same item on the same forum for way more. This has a second order effect that these high price posts sit in the forum for long periods of time, so when Jon shows up to sell his table, he sees 50 other tables to $200 and thinks that's an appropriate price. Good deals appear to no longer exist!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
It is very interesting that in most big cities around the world, but especially Europe having a car is a big luxury while in the US homeless people have cars.
And that per capita Europe has a bigger unhoused problem than the United States. There aren't simple solutions, because the real solutions would change how society needs to work. Maybe less about money and more about the right to survive or something.
If you want to split up Europe to make the comparison favorable, split up the US to make it less favorable again. How many US states are below the per capita level of homelessness in the US?
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.
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, 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 increasingly 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.
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.
At my current place (apartment in a suburb about 10km from the city center) our parking would cost ~180 USD per month. From a tech worker perspective it is not like unaffordable, but definetily a luxury for most of the population. The median after-tax income in Sweden is like 3k USD.
That tax I mentioned before also makes very old beat-up cars not worth keeping (which is the intent of the tax to be fair).
One of the main upsides of living in a detached 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.
The issue in America is that you can own a car, not pay for upkeep, not pay registration, not pay for insurance, not pay to park and still drive it many times without consequence.
"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
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.
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.
I find little of interest in that. The US enforces private property in a far more aggressive manner than most other countries, and the definition of public property, and functional amount thereof, are also very different. Merely laying down behind a bush can be a violation of "Illegal Camping within City Limits"/
Additionally, rent can easily be inaccessible for the employed. And for those who don't have vehicles, 'just moving to a cheaper area" is not a practical option.
Do they have too much food? It seems to me that calorically dense foods that provide almost no nutritional value are “cheap” and abundant while healthy food choices are expensive and require time and effort to store and prep.
For example, if I’m living out of a car I’m more likely to use EBT to buy some bags of chips I can toss in the car rather than some cheap chicken and fresh veggies or eggs. How would I store chicken or cook any of it if I live in a car?
Yes, I know there are solutions here like small fridges and hot plates. But those cost money and require time and effort. Again, scenario is living in a car or the streets.
Btw calorically dense foods are, in fact, hyper nutritious. While you may imagine healthy foods to be green vegetables and raw meats, you can buy - from regular supermarkets - roast chickens ready to eat, salad bowls and fresh fruit. You need not even store it, but buy and eat on the go.
People repeat the myth that healthy food choices are expensive (they aren't) and time & space consuming to make (they can be) so often that most people believe it. But it just isn't so: you can eat at McDonalds every day, and if it's only a part of your diet, it's healthy. If you can get fibre and some vitamins elsewhere, and aren't overeating, the protein and calories in a fries and a hamburger are fine. Good, actually.
Healthy foods are simply principally marketed to, sold at a large markup to, middle to upper class Americans so they believe that's the usual market value.
Now, it can be expensive in time, effort and equipment for struggling, hard working, irregular shift workers. That's a different issue though.
Cars have space. A camp stove in the trunk and you can cook anything. Likewise a cooler and you can store things for a short time. Since you have a car you can drive to a supermarket regularly and thus not need to store anything for longer than the cooler can keep them fresh.
Food deserts don't exist if you have a car in any American city since it is never that far to a suburb. (if you don't have a car getting is much much harder)
I have done the above - as a contractor working in a place a significant distance from home on a short term job. There were a lot of people like me in the cheap hotels I was staying at. OTOH, none of us were homeless - the homeless generally have other issues making them homeless and so even though that options would be cheap and work that doesn't mean they would be able to do it
> Yes, I know there are solutions here like small fridges and hot plates. But those cost money and require time and effort. Again, scenario is living in a car or the streets.
There's at least one benefit to China dumping solar cells and other stuff all over the world: even as a homeless person... at least as long as you got a car, an EcoFlow Glacier and a shit solar panel are less than a grand, and it provides both a refrigerator, a small freezer and a way to keep your devices charging.
A thousand dollars may as well be a million dollars. In my personal experience, gifting a thousand dollars to someone in housing distress will not lead to the purchase of a solar panel.
I'm talking about "working homeless" here. There are many people living out of their cars because they can't afford a proper home but still have money they can spend, and many of them in fact are living some kind of "stealth camper" setup with accompanying gear.
But that gear would have been infeasible even ten years ago - the status quo outside of luxury campers for six figures was absorber refrigeration [1] that needs a heat source - either powered by natural gas, which has challenges relating to safety as well as high consumption, or by electricity, which was lead-acid batteries back then.
The power density of lithium cells today is what makes that possible in the first place.
Poverty-homeless people however are a different thing, agreed on that. If you don't have a lockable place to store stuff you might as well have nothing at all...
Got it. I mainly work with people who have severely fallen off the cliff with almost no way to climb back out. I totally see how this new gear could keep someone from reaching a critical breaking point.
One problem with what? Also, a problem is not “too much food”. This is an absurd statement. The problem is non nutritive, unhealthy food loaded with calories. Work in any troubled urban center and you will encounter a complete lack of actual grocery stores selling healthy food. Instead you get fast food, bodegas and convenience stores selling low quality, cheap items. We have known of this problem for decades. The poor are poor and certainly don’t have the income for “too much food”.
> IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.
It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around. You go around and the music stops. Everyone scrambles to their nearest chair. Obviously the person on crutches will be the first to fall out of the game. The rest then talk about laziness, drugs, bootstraps, and all the rest. But add 1 more chair and there's no problem, even the dude with the broken leg can sit.
Someone tried to build the extra chair but the endless required studies and legal challenges from existing chair-sitters bankrupted the would-be chair builder.
Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
> Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Maybe you need 5 chairs? Here in SF supply has fallen decades behind the demand curve to the point it may be impossible to catch up even if all you did was build build build.
decades of reasonable, consistently applied housing policy led to the creation of islands of wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty. ergo, this is the purpose. this is how the people there want to live. I left many years ago when I realized the futility of it all.
I call SF and Silicon Valley “the world’s only slum for the rich.”
What buys you a trap house or an apartment with hallways that smell like piss in SF or the Valley will buy you a mansion in 90% of the country at least.
Everyone wants to blame existing landowners and sure they share part of it but the lion's share of the blame ought to be directed at do-gooders (land owning or otherwise) who are unwilling to be honest (with themselves, or in the internet comments) and admit that every policy that "looks good" based on the one sided statements presented in abstract by its peddlers.
Each one of those policies is part of the system that gets us the results we have and the peddlers all share in the blame.
Surely at least part of it is the concentration of wealth and economic activity. There's large masses of decaying rural towns where houses are cheap, but at the same time the whole reason they're decaying is because there just isn't enough economic opportunity to afford even these cheap houses.
I have no clue what the overall balance of housing looks like, but surely it doesn't help that big chunks of the housing market are being deprecated at the same time.
Well, for generations now, exponential growth in all things has been state policy and it was good (tm). Because of population growth, there's always a shortage of housing. Population is projected to peak this century. Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?
> Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?
In many places in Europe and Asia, the govt will essentially pay you to go live in near-abandoned villages and revitalize them.
In USA it’s just ghost towns. See also Detroit
The problem is better described as "There aren't enough homes where people want to live". We have plenty of houses, even in america. The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby). So everyone resists building.
But it's okay, if you resist building for long enough then your town will eventually collapse and your house will be worth nothing anyway. Many american Towns are essentially insolvent and can't afford realistic upkeep prices for services like sewage, roads, good schools, etc., and are living on borrowed time until infrastructure collapses and nobody wants to buy there. See Strong Towns the book.
> The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby).
Infrastructure is a major deal. You can't really exist as a member of modern society without broadband Internet, unless you're Amish or whatever and even they have begun to shift attitudes. Starlink changed the calculation quite a bit, and it definitely helps, but other things such as cellphone reception and emergency services that arrive in a reasonable time are also important.
> It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around.
Actually, there are. In Germany for example, we have millions of units left empty... the catch is, these are in (extremely) rural areas. Areas that used to be populated, but no longer are because the government has let them fall extremely behind in modern amenities. Some even do not have cellphone service.
Normally, you'd expect people and companies to do a pricing arbitrage and move where housing is cheap, but unfortunately, when there is no local employment or the infrastructure does not support remote employment, or other crucial requirements (safe potable water, electrical grid, grocery stores, schools, some sort of entertainment) are lacking, this does not work out any more.
See I’ve had this insane wild idea for years that homelessness could be related to inadequate housing supply.
Wild I know. People not having something being related to not enough of that thing.
But we have to stop those developers! If there’s ever a food shortage will people be saying “stop greedy farmers?”
Actually they probably will. Not enough food so obviously farmers are causing it and it’s a conspiracy. I’m sure that’s what the TikTok slop and Xhitter rage bait would say.
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.
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.
Great business model but terrible thing to actually use. If you have so much junk you need a storage unit, you probably need to declutter. Most people have too much junk.
On the other hand, new homes are not being built and this may be a way to compensate for so many people still acquiring the same level of junk but not owning enough homes or space to store it all. Previous generations wouldn’t have had as much of an issue when real estate was much cheaper.
Viewable from the commuter train (BART), there is a large storage facility in Oakland which advertises air conditioned units.
Outside is a large homeless encampment. Sigh.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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 thing is, they rarely sell the properties. At least from what I've seen. It's all unrealized appreciated value.
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.
McDonald's is invested in franchisee's success, it wouldn't be a great business otherwise.
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.
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.
Rent is the realization of value appreciation - value is just the NPV of future rents
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.
As someone once put it: "McDonald's is a real estate company with a hamburger hobby"
Reminds me of the similar one about Harvard with a hedge fund and a little school.
Or quite a few religious organizations.
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.
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!
The original LLM agents
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?
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.
Duke: A healthcare system with a little University.
Same is also true of DJT's various casino gambits. Pilloried in the media but rather sound (though high risk) from a land speculation perspective.
You're saying that bankrupting a casino was actually 4D chess? Ok, buddy, whatever you say.
Did I say that? Since they failed, they were obviously bad business. But they were a rational thing to attempt to do - taking on a massive loan to speculate on land and using a (potentially) high cashflow, quick to setup, easy to market business to offset the high initial interest rates. i.e. the same thing being discussed in this thread
FWIW “Gambit” without elaboration strongly invokes the “the bankrupcies were on purpose” to me, so, did you say it? Strictly no, but it was very suggestive.
Eh. I wanted to be provocative because I've heard a lot of educated but economically naive people assume 'highly leveraged hotel-casino project' is dumb a priori, even though it's (an example of a) a sensible and common business strategy available to the wealthy. I didn't mean to imply bankruptcy was intentional though.
As to whether Trump did this better or worse than others, I have no idea as I haven't studied it but would assume the latter given the outcome.
A certainty though - plenty of undeserving people you would consider contemptible have successfully played this hand many a time. Yet more reasons to tax land
A rational thing for a competent person to attempt. Given the theoretical structural advantages of the idea, the 6 failures are even more embarrassing than failing at something that was actually a bad idea.
Bankruptcy is great actually, you don't have to pay the money you owe but if you play your cards right you can still keep the benefits.
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.
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.
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).
I personally don't get car washes. I just wait for it to rain. Then free car wash...
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.
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.
I suspect the fear is overblown.
The fear may be outdated.
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.
I've never had a frame go bad that soon. Most of those are recalls where they replace the frame
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.
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.
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.
Not disagreeing with you. That's exactly what my mechanic saw as well which is why he warned me.
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.
I live in New York, which is heavy handed with salt. Paints and alloys are better, but there’s basically a 250k and about 10 year lifespan for a car that lives upstate.
The frame, exhaust and suspension generally get corroded and start to fail. You see a lot of 200k Civics and Accords, but few 250k.
You really notice it when traveling to California. Last time I was in SFO with my son, he counted 78 Porsche 911s and about 100 “old” (80s or older) cars on the roads.
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 controlling.
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.
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 used to wash my car once a year, then I just ran out of time ;)
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.
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.
I rarely wash as well. But we're in a minority in US society.
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.
Most Canadian cities prohibit washing anything (car, bike, etc) outside with soap unless you're capturing the runoff. Even biodegradable soaps.
Car wash is the only legal way to use soap, for better or worse.
> unless you're capturing the runoff
And doing what with it, exactly?
Not sure if it's the same in Canada, but where I am from the problem is the oil (lubricant and fuel) from the car and at car washes the runoff gets treated by letting it go through an oil trap.
The trapped oil gets disposed of separately, the treated oil-free water goes to the sewer.
Hell if I know.
AFAIK the regulations were put into place to prevent untreated water from going into storm drains and into the water system, so presumably the cities are fine if you pour it down into the bathtub drain and let it go to the waste water treatment plants.
I appreciate the sentiment, but is the gunk on the car not the gunk that would have washed down the drains in the first place? Clearly there are plenty of nasty cleaning agents, but one supposes that safe ones might be used (I actually spent a while considering exactly this, and it's possible but not super easy getting an environmentally friendly car cleaner). I guess the issue is it's hard to tell from mere drive-by observation what cleaner is being used.
You can allow the liquid to evaporate off in an evaporation pond, or combine it with an absorbent gel. Then the solids can be put in trash.
I assume no one actually does this when washing their car.
Car washes are an order of magnitude more water efficient (enforced by state agencies) than individual home car washing.
Yeah that could be a concern depending where you live. Where I live, water is cheap and abundant. And I've never measured, but I would guess I use maybe 10 gallons to wash a car. 2 gallons in the bucket, and just a light wetting followed by soapy sponge and then a rinse, using a nozzle to create a high velocity spray. The water doesn't run at all unless I'm spraying it on the car.
Water is cheap and abundant where I live, too. If we have a problem with water in any normal year, it is usually that we have to deal with a surplus of it. (We put drainage tiles under our farm fields to get rid of excess water and generally don't even bother with irrigation systems at all.)
But car washes are interesting systems and one of the things that makes them interesting is that the water they use is (often) recycled. The same water gets reclaimed and re-used to wash cars over and over again.
I didn't look very deep at all, but one car wash chain suggests[1] a reclamation rate of 70%. Not perfect, but way better than 0.
[1]: https://www.tsunamiexpress.com/our-washes/
You can probably match that efficiency at home by using an electric pressure washer. Mine does 1.2 GPM, which means an entire car wash is only a few gallons.
Yes. In the same way that dishwashers are an order of magnitude more water-efficient than washing by hand. (But consume a kilowatt of electricity heating the water and running the pump, which is the part that everyone always leaves out.)
You heat the water when you wash dishes by hand too, don't you? It's not very hygenic to do dishes with just cold water.
Given that by hand you use much more hot water than the dishwasher would, you're using more electricity (or gas). Since a little pump doesn't use much at all, it's mainly just the drying heat that matters. Though nobody is forced to use the drying cycle - if one enjoys drying dishes by hand, they can still use the dishwasher to do the washing.
In my house you don't heat the water but it's been sitting in a metal water tank at equitorial latitude for hours so is generally quite warm for evening dishes.
Is it safe? Not for a restaurant where the temps need to get to parasite killing temps to pass muster.. but if I had to guess, the odds of getting killed by a bad-tempered cow outweigh it by 10x.
You're assuming an absence of solar hot water heaters - the world isn't homogenous.
eg. Our household conserves water (we track every litre we bring up to the tanks and filter) and we don't have a dishwasher - hot water is heated by the sun and run-off goes to the grey water tank for the garden.
When my water heating was electric, switching to a dishwasher consistently led to lower electric bills compared to a year prior (confirmed for 12 whole months).
You save water and electricity.
But can you put dishes with food on them in the dish washer?
Yes.
That's surprising. I once tried an automated car wash just to see what all the hullabaloo was about and I think the rain actually does a better job. Worst $5 I've ever spent...
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. :-)
Rain tends to just move the dirt around, at least where I am.
Where do you live? I live in the Midwest (SE MI) and when there's rain it tends to be medium-to-heavy rain and with wind so sideways.
Other continent :)
You ever park under trees?
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.
> I would LOVE to own a laundromat.
My (late) kid brother did that for a number of years. Big time sink and PITA.
too many moving parts lol
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nikXsAW12Wo
Oh actually, yes - that comes up once in a while as well.
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.
Or conversely, if you have cash income you need to launder…
Sounds like a great idea for a movie, or even a TV show ;)
Land value tax!
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.
$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.
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.
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.
There are more self-storage facilities than there are Starbucks, Subways and McDonalds -- combined.
Read that again.
Wendover productions has a great video on the phenomena of self-storage and the economics around this: https://youtu.be/uEVv8SOJ6Is
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.
Sell the shovels in the gold rush etc.
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.
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 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.
Suspect it’s far more than $80/month - I was paying that much for a small unit about 30 years ago! (In a LCOL area too!)
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.
Love to see some numbers on what starting up a self-storage runs.
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.
It is difficult for people to throw things away.
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.
facebook marketplace for $10 or $20 is magic. People don't like free as much as they like paying $10 or $20 for a $50 item
A nominal fee convinces people they're getting a bargain. "Free" feels like you're driving to someone's house to pick up their trash.
Very well said, I often feel the same way.
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 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?
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.
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 solid waste bill, my municipality will let me set out up to 20 (!) bags of trash per week with up to 50 lb (!) in them every week. 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.
Which state so I can avoid it?
>hazardous waste is open a few days a month
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.
> Here in NH it's either once or twice a year
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 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.
https://affald.kk.dk/affaldsfraktion/saadan-sorterer-du-farl...
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.
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.
Allowing people to put off the disposal ceremony is the primary value of the service!
Why assume that disposal is warranted? Sometimes, people actually reuse what they store. Also, it's better to donate than to dispose.
Sure.. donation is easy, doesn't require a storage unit.
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.
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.
>Also, it's better to donate than to dispose
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.
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'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.
You're hauling the stuff regardless.
Dealing with renting a storage unit vs deciding to throw away your Pokemon cards feels like kind of a wash.
Are you infinitely wealthy? Storage units are a slow leak on finances, just like uncanceled subscriptions and mobile phone plan features.
Rebuying decorations every year is also a leak on finances. Rebuying a bunch of camping gear (more than I can comfortably store in my home) is also a leak on finances.
It's far cheaper to use a storage unit for a lot of this stuff I do routinely use than buying and selling a house just to get more storage space at home.
I'm not blind to the fact not everyone just stores junk they never use. I'm certain there's a percentage of stuff in mine that is probably better off sold or trashed. But until we stop changing decorations for the different seasons, stop a number of hobbies with bulky stuff, or move to a giant mansion I just don't have the space and could use a few more square feet of pure storage space.
The answer is pretty simple: reduce your possessions to the space you can fill for free.
So give up on hobbies and everything occasional that requires some equipment since they can’t keep it at home, so basically give up on things that make life worth living to a lot of people. Yeah nah.
So, own nothing.
Every square footage of every home costs $$$ to keep in your possession. I pay a mortgage. I pay insurance. I pay taxes. I pay maintenance costs. There were acquisition costs in the purchase of it, and there will be acquisition costs wherever I go next. Not one square inch of my home is "free".
Suddenly that simple answer isn't so simple when actually confronted with reality, unless you're willing to be homeless and just carry your possessions in your hands.
i think they are suggesting to rethink the need for things like seasonal decorations if you are forced to pay a life long recurring fee for the privilege.
> if you are forced to pay a life long recurring fee for the privilege.
I have to regardless of a storage unit or in a closet in my house. That closet in my home and that shelf in my garage isn't free either.
So then it's just a question of owning anything at all or nothing, because it all has a life long recurring fee for the privilege of continuing to own it. And yes, my family finds value in decorating for holidays as a part of celebrating, remembering, and keeping traditions alive.
Sometimes people don't just want to live in the same IKEA box 365 days a year.
No, I'm not, and I've also never rented a storage unit.
It seems hard to imagine the sums involved becoming comparable to other amounts of money lit on fire to avoid fights with family though (i.e. home renovation, travel).
Interesting comparison and one I didn't consider. Thanks for the insight!
Who tf is breaking the bank on subscriptions and phone bills?
Are all these comments like yours coming from college students or what? If anything else, a storage unit is one of the most valuable things to pay for if you just moved out on your own.
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).
I live near some storage facilities, and a significant number of them are rented by businesses.
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.
Demand is outpacing supply, so new supply is serving that unmet demand, not creating it.
This is Jevon's paradox - as you make the supply better and more efficient to use, people will demand more of it.
That assumes the market is saturated, and there's nothing you could do to convince a non-customer to become a customer.
I live in a small downtown condo. I don't have room to store a whole lot of extra stuff but I also have hobbies like camping, watersports, etc. I keep all of that stuff in a storage unit and I access it fairly often. Since I have it I also use it to save all the boxes for my electronics (77" OLED is impossible to move safely without original box for example), car maintenance stuff, larger tools I use less frequently, etc. It is about 3 minutes drive 10 minute walk from my house. I definitely do not use it to hoard stuff I will never touch again.
>77" OLED is impossible to move safely without original box for example)
Exactly same here - well curved super ultrawide. Without the curved box styrofoam it can't move. Though in hindsight it was a bad deal...at ~60 bucks a month I could have replaced the screen...
my 10 year old 75" TV cost me upwards of $70, probably $100, to move across town -- at the cost of the boxes and packing material and labor the movers provided.
When I move again in a few months I think I'll just throw it in the back of my SUV and hope it doesn't break.
I moved my large tv cross country twice. The movers build a wooden and cardboard crate for it. Very safe.
Wrap it in a blanket and it'll probably be fine.
In your own car, sure, in a moving van, probably not.
Taking this moment to remind everyone that 'Swedish death cleaning' is a healthy, holistic way to not give a storage unit your money.
https://www.thespruce.com/swedish-death-cleaning-4801461
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 tenant 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.
> Swedish death cleaning is a decluttering practice from Sweden that emphasizes organizing your belongings before you die
Well I haven't died yet, so I suppose the time is right.
Do they blast Entombed albums while performing Swedish death cleaning?
Anything produced by Max Martin is ok.
200 years later: "Why do we have so few historical artifacts from Sweden in the early 2000s??"
And a somewhat lighthearted meme to go with it: https://i.redd.it/v8h0q00xs2371.jpg
Apparently the Swede's have a term for how I live my life in general. Gotta minimize the work for whoever shows up after I pull the eject lever.
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.
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
etc. etc.
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 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.
Take a few quick photos and ask an AI to assess if any nearby museum might be interested?
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.
There was a solid analysis of these facilities done by Modern MBA. https://modern-mba.com/case/self-storage
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.
> dealing with some life event such as moving, a death in the family, divorce
The 4 Ds of self storage: Death, divorce, dislocation, downsizing
> a solid analysis
This is AI slop.
Yet another reason for land value taxes. It's astonishing how many problems they solve
Near my house I saw two large blocky buildings being constructed on a main thoroughfare. Different construction companies, but within about 100 yards of each other.
"Fantastic!", I thought. New apartment buildings. That means new restaurants, stores, and other conveniences. Not to mention desperately-needed housing.
I'll never forget my despair upon learning that they were BOTH going to be large multi-level self-storage facilities.
Yeah, but consider! There's a high likelihood that they'll still be housing for someone.
"You can't live in those, there's no indoor plumbing!"
Buddy let me tell you about 99% of human existence.
Don’t dox yourself but this sounds just like Irvine, CA. It feels like every two years I see a new track of homes + block storage facilities being built
I'm on the other side of the country, and I can watch new super deluxe drive-thru carwashes being built with a storage facility neighbor.
The crazy part being two blocks over is a competing super deluxe-carwash with storage facility neighbor.
At this point my city is up to dozens of these pairs of property squatting businesses.
This was exactly Mount Vernon, Washington. I was so disappointed.
About half of Whidbey Island.
My childhood baseball field is now a self-storage.
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.
I thought you could buy a used shipping container for like a grand, so that is a ridiculous rental rate.
These are slightly higher end, and from what I've seen they go for $2-3000. But still yes, it is ridiculous, and the company wont offer them for sale per the current contract! For convenience sake he'd rather pay the monthly fee than haul all his junk out, get them to pick the container up, buy new ones, and put all his cheap useless junk back in.
It's maddening!
Damn, first I misread your comment as saying your father charges other people 500 a month.
He could probably find someone to move the stuff for him for a small fee.
If only you knew my father and his distrust of most things. He's been watching 5+ hours of Fox News daily for 30+ years. There isn't much left in that mind.
One day you may be thankful that the junk is already in containers. You should be able to winch those up on a container truck for disposal
Just sorting it out for him
Shipping container costs went up after covid, but still, at their peak you could buy one for ~$5k, $500/month is insane rental price especially if he never moves it.
I looked up prices for 40ft container: pre-covid: Under $2,000, Peak Pandemic (2020-2021): >$8,000; 2022-2024: prices falling, Current: $2,300
Ah, I was thinking of the 20ft, which can still be had for $1-$2k. If you are storing junk, might as well go for the big guy.
20ft containers cost almost the same as 40ft containers due to supply/demand.
A couple months ago I paid $3500 delivered for a 1-trip 20ft container just outside the Bay Area. It was the best of four bids.
The cheap ones are damaged or may be leaky, so they aren't necessarily good options for anything that you want to stay clean, dry, and rodent-free.
I can corroborate that. I once rented a “storage unit” on Treasure Island — the cheapest facility “in” San Francisco by far. It was just containers with plywood walls built inside them to create units.
My stuff all got wet from condensation and I threw away 90% of what we had in it. Lesson learned.
My friend got one for free, along with some miscellaneous office furniture inside of it (mostly useless, but some very solid pieces from the mid 1980s or so).
We use it as emergency shelter and camping supplies storage on his rural land.
The major pain of shipping containers is transporting it to its place of destination and not having the local municipality throw a fit about it (they really don't like unpermitted stuff).
Renting one for such long term seems like 10x worse than renting an internet router.
His storage unit may have HVAC and electricity, plus is paying for some warranty of security.
If the units are on his property, it's very unlikely he's getting the benefit of HVAC/electricity/security.
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
When cleaning out your possessions you have to keep in mind everything has an implicit storage cost.
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?
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).
Counterpoint: hoarding resources is an evolved, beneficial trait, at least in the past. Frugality is a very modern virtue
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
You never know that odd piece of metal that fell off the toy you bought 15 years ago will be useful in a few years.
Surely not $500/month per container? Do you mean for all of them together?
Yes, all together. He has 4, 20-footers with extra insulation.
"This person makes different life choices than I would in that situation. Therefore, they have a disease."
We call these "above-ground landfills." After watching (and helping) my parents shuffle stuff around these facilities for years, we drew a hard line in our household: no external storage. If it doesn't fit in the space we live in, we're not keeping it. Great article!
> our household: no external storage. If it doesn't fit in the space we live in, we're not keeping it
This assumes you can afford a space to live in that has minimally adequate space to store necessary posessions.
In many areas that is nearly impossible, it would cost millions for a house that can have enough sqft to keep the basic minimum sport/hobby/inheritance things one needs.
My wife and I needed a storage locker due to a very slow house move along with her parents giving us some (wanted) furniture from their recent move. The spare bedroom we had been using as an office and storage space needed to be cleared out for a friend that was going to live with us for a bit. We just couldn't keep everything in our apartment and the house just wasn't ready for most of our stuff. I knew plenty of stories of people keeping storage units full of forgotten junk and I didn't want that happening with us. We made a promise to each other that we would get the unit empty within the month we finally could move into the house. The unit was of a decent size and only $20/month for the 2 or 3 months we had it so it was pretty inexpensive but we were pretty cash strapped at the time. The rate was going to jump up a lot more if we had kept it longer. We barely had enough to pay movers to help move the big stuff, we did all the small stuff ourselves. Intentionally, the storage unit was on the route between the apartment and house so it was easy to just pickup a few things at a time. Finally when it was time to move things in, we were able to get it done in about a week, right before the increased renewal rate was about to be charged. I was doing reno work for the landlord during this time so we technically had a house to live in but it's pretty annoying trying to live in a place while you're sanding drywall and replacing flooring.
Way to have a plan and stick to it. If it's necessary, good idea to set a deadline.
Yeah I just don’t understand. I sold so much second hand furniture online. Each sale you get a little bit of adrenaline rush from a buyer handing you cash while you get rid of old stuff. (No adrenaline with electronic direct deposits.)
My idea for innovative self storage pricing: offer free month 1, $1 month 2, $2 month three, $4 month four and so on. Very soon it obviously will become untenable, and you will either stop paying and get your shit out of there.
I probably would be adversely selected by people who really only need a couple months of storage. But would force people to work against their instincts to store all their trash.
Storage space inevitably fills up with stuff. I have the stereotypical "garage too full of stuff to park the car in" but it's one side of a 2-car garage and the other side, and this the wife and I are in perfect agreement on, is reserved for the car.
Then I inherited a second car, which for various reasons is barely practical to keep while it works. It lives outside so that the stuff in the garage (a clutter of far too many bicycles, mostly) can stay accessible. But in winter, it is possible - barely - to park the car inside, with bicycles hanging only inches above it. Some stuff had to be disposed of to make this possible, and I fear some additional stuff will have to go this fall. But you have to set yourself limits or the stuff will grow infinitely.
Meanwhile premium locations all over town are sprouting Dymon Self Storage units. That's the local brand of "premium climate controlled storage". There's one less than a mile, as the crow flies, from my house.
I've always wanted to have a "shop" - a detached space, like a pole barn, where I could work on projects and store things. A lot of people I know in my life have such an arrangement and I'm occasionally jealous.
These days, I live on a large enough piece of land that I could pretty easily construct such a building. However, I've stopped myself because I've realized that I just fill up whatever space I have. If there's room to store something, you can just put it there and plan to deal with it later (of course, later almost never comes). I'm the type of person that has a hard time getting rid of things that I paid good money for or that have sentimental value, and as I get older I'm increasingly envious of those people who have less hesitation about throwing stuff out. For some things, selling is an option, but that has its own set of hassles.
I have a garage like you that has one stall full of stuff - family bikes, tools, a table saw, grill, etc. Stuff that we do use, though some of it is probably not used enough to justify the space it takes up. Every time I clean up the garage now I try to make a point to get rid of some things, though all that does is tend to break even with the new stuff that inevitably gets added.
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.
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.
I was angered and frustrated to find (the hard way) that some states have statutes which explicitly relieve storage companies from responsibility in the event of loss from theft.
The entity in the best position to know how to secure the premises is not liable to do so at all in some states.
Oh, and don’t get me started on ballooning but opaque rental rates.
I wanted to pay up front for 2-3 years of storage but most places “couldn’t” quote me what the rate would be beyond 3 months in advance.
Such a scammy industry.
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.
According to George Carlin, "that's the whole meaning of life, trying to find a place for your stuff".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
My late father was a child during the depression era and so he grew up to be very resourceful/thrifty, hard working, and epitomized the "waste not, want not" slogan. So yes it can come off as hoarding and it was a lot to go through after he passed. Yet after a lifetime of scrimping, saving, reusing, and repurposing, he ended up with quite a lot to show for it. He never paid for storage, didn't clutter any open spaces, but every closet or spare room of his home was packed.
If you have the storage then by all means keep whatever you value. If it would require paying a recurring fee to keep it, then it better be worth it.
Even if you have the space I'd caution against it. Cleaning out my parent's house after my mother's death was a chore, and they weren't hoarders in the classic sense but they had a lot of stuff. Thousands of family photographs, in boxes, that had never been organized or put in albums. Clothing, in suitcases, that hadn't been worn in decades. Toys from my childhood. Furniture with almost zero resale value. It all went in a dumpster. It was emotionally draining to get rid of some of it because I had memories attached to it. The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it. Even after all that I probably ended up keeping too much of it. I now have several shelves in my basement with boxes from my parent's house, that I have never opened since bringing them home.
I have promised myself that I will not leave that kind of accumulated junk for my kids to sort through some day, but I honestly wonder if I will get around to doing my own purge. It hasn't happened yet.
> The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it.
I took the same lesson from clearing out my parents things. What I'm trying to do now is to clear out incrementally. Doing a full sweep is way too easy to defer to future me and therefore never happens, so I try to do a small amount regularly. My big box of cables (another recent thread here) is a rich source of material that will keep me busy for a while. Pretty sure nobody will appreciate going through that.
Also just trying to notice things around the place that I really don't need, books I'll never read again, boxes that have not been opened for years. A little bit at a time. Removing each one gives a small sense of achievement.
Relatable. In my case my dad passed away and at the time my relationship with him wasn’t the best. It wasn’t until I had a child of my own, about 5 years later, that I started to empathize with him orders of magnitude more - and to wish I had more of his things to help me feel closer to him. Sadly, I had kept almost none of it because I lived in a 1-bedroom condo in the city at that time and didn’t feel like I could spare any space for any of it.
> and to wish I had more of his things to help me feel closer to him
Yes. When one is young it is difficult to appreciate this, but later in middle age this becomes very precious. Store everything, your future self will be happier for it.
My grandfather was like this, grew up in the depression and fought in the pacific during ww2. His garage was full of coffe can after coffee can filled with random nuts and bolts. When I was a kid every meal with my grandparents was 50% leftovers and they had a giant garden. Waste not want not indeed.
I found soap decades old, very likely older than half a century. Hundreds of boxes and hence thousands of soap bars. I'd regularly found them for years and years here and there for my great aunt had stashed those left and right. I found some in system ceilings (!), in the attic, in the basement, in drawers.
My great aunt died years and years ago (RIP) but as recently as a few weeks ago my brother and I cleaned/emptied a garage where she had hidden some stuff.
More soap bars.
I don't need the physics/chemistry: I know that soap is a stable molecule. I suspect some of the soap bars were dating back to WWII.
My great aunt was also in the "waste not / want not" camp. But as she lived through WWII as a teenager, she was in fear of ever missing things again. Hence the soap bars.
This makes me wonder how many people have a garage full of TP just in case COVID-29 plays out like the first one did.
I definitely make a point of keeping a small stock TP (and cheap/easy food, like bologna, hot dogs, and bread) around in these post-covid days.
Not to the extreme of the story about the soap, above, but: Something in my mind was changed a little bit more every time I'd go to the store and there were empty shelves. So now I do things like always have a few weeks of TP, and I freeze things like bread and bologna.
I never did that at any point in my adult life leading up to COVID: If I ran out of something, I just picked up more later at the store the next time I was nearby (or any other time; lots of things were 24/7 back then).
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.
Are you sure they even will want it back? Might be better to just donate it all now and save the money.
If my parents had done that I would have been pissed.
They just recently cleared out the attic and unloaded my childhood stuff on me, and I gladly took it all back.
I suspect this is highly variable between people. I can imagine kids who would be deeply attached to their stuff, deeply apathetic and want nearly none of it, and a few who would think they wanted a lot of it and yet would realize it wasn’t a big deal to them.
Only tough part is determining which one they’ll be!
If it were me as the college student though, I would find it fair if a summer were declared the Summer Of Claiming Your Crap, and all stuff that I actually wanted had to be in designated storage bins that I’d commit to come retrieve after college, and the rest would be donated.
Donating it without consulting me would have seemed like a betrayal, no matter whether I actually needed it.
This must be a generational issue. My kids took “their” things with them when they became autonomous adults. As parents, we raised our children that they would move out and establish their own identities and futures. We never created any expectation that their childhood home would serve as a storage facility, extended stay facility or even exist. We of course offer help and support when needed.
I know this is in conflict with a lot of modern parenting for many reasons. Our primary goal was to create independent, autonomous, fully functional adults capable of funding their own lives and determining their own future.
Kind of hard to take my stuff when I was attending college and then working clear on the other side of the country.
Other than renting a U-Haul and driving 2,800 miles, there weren’t many options. Which I even suggested, to which my parents insisted they were happy to hang on to the stuff until it was easier to do the handover.
>never created any expectation that their childhood home would serve…facility, extended stay facility or even exist.
Sounds like a pretty sad mindset to me. Between me and your kids, I wonder which are happier to visit their parents?
I once, in a divorce, sent at least two carloads (about 25 average size boxes) of personal belongings across the country by UPS. It cost like $600. If you’re a grown-up and settling somewhere after college, I think it’s a cool move to take your crap off your parents’ hands by shipping it to yourself when you’re home and at least blessing the disposal of the rest.
I get that some people even at 25, think they haven’t got a so-called “permanent address” except Mom and Dad’s (and I’m not being derisive, I have dear friends who felt like that), but none of us have a permanent home and I think it’s best if we mentally think of ourselves as not being “only temporarily here” as early in life as practical.
I somewhat expected my post would generate this type of attack and then lead to my parenting style is better than years, my kids are more successful than yours, my kids are happier to visit us than you, ad nauseam.
Parenting is hard and there are multiple approaches that lead to successful outcomes. Your approach worked and I am happy for you. Congratulations on your successful approach.
>I know this is in conflict with a lot of modern parenting for many reasons. Our primary goal was to create independent, autonomous, fully functional adults capable of funding their own lives and determining their own future.
This heavily implies that the children of other "modern" parents are dysfunctional adults. As they say "to throw the stone and hide the hand". The funnier thing is that your parenting style is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon.
There is no implication here. It is clearly stated as "Our primary goal", not your primary goal. You are reading way too much into this.
I agree it is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon, but not sure what is funny about it. Societies and systems constantly change and evolve. This is part of progress, and yes, can also cause setbacks.
My use of the term "conflict" might be what is triggering. Maybe "bucks the trend" or "not in line with" would be better.
Many approaches to parenting are successful. I presented my approach. Others work.
Now you're characterizing what you've done as progress, to defend characterizing it as opposed to modern parenting, and you anticipated attacks from other people. I'll tell you why I think you anticipated attacks after I tell you a reason why I disagree.
I agree that it has been a generational thing. It was called the "Me Generation." Me, me, me. In the animal kingdom, parents abandoning their children to be completely independent is mostly common among insects, lizards, and amphibians, and is associated with large litters and a massive death rate among them. It's not modern, it's a feature of creatures that are lower than mammals.
What's triggering is the fact that you've decided to brag about your superior parenting in public, and claim the evidence of that is that you have told your children that you're done with them. Nobody asked you, and you're aware that normal people don't do that to people that they are close to (hence the need to lecture.) Everybody raises their children to have the ability to be completely independent and self-sufficient. You just think you're uniquely successful at that, and that it somehow would be the child's fault if you've failed.
Your kids didn't ask to be born, and if you don't rescue them from their failure (at least initially), it will be a reflection on you. If we are in the same social circles, and I know about this, I will judge you. Even hearing you explain it, and your feigned confusion (I guarantee you have this conversation all the time), would make me wary of hiring you into a management position.
I'm not a lizard. I want everybody I care about to be self-sufficient, and I also don't want them to try to be unless they actually have to be. They have resources available to them that are not always being fully utilized, and when those resources can give them an advantage in any context, I would be angry if they weren't used.
There are always limits to self-sufficiency, because there are massive advantages to abandoning it: that's what we call civilization.
Very good points. Thanks for the insight and critique. There is a reason I don't wade into social topics and usually only comment on technical things I have worked on and this is helping me understand why!
Also, for all you knew at the time you replied, OP could've still had stuff in their parents' attic because they joined the Marines at 18 and was even more independent than your own kids. There was a lot of projection onto a trivial story.
Plus "must be a generational issue" just sounds like more of the same "my generation was responsible/good/normal unlike kids these days" meme that gets repeated by every generation as they age and is tiresome to hear as an explanation for everything.
Yes, I can see this now. Thanks for the insight.
Honestly telling your kid going off to college (or elsewhere) "you have to take everything from you care about, the rest is going to go away" seems like a good way to stunt their independence. The natural reaction would be to take as much as they can of their current life, which is then going to be a burden preventing them from growing into a new life.
When you put it this way, it is very anxiety inducing and I understand that. What this is helping me realize is that my childhood, and our lives of our children were different than many of the commenters, not necessarily better or worse.
As children, my siblings and I didn't have a lot of stuff, and our family didn't have a lot of stuff either. It certainly wasn't our intent to traumatize and stunt our children and this doesn't seem to be the case. I will certainly ask them.
What stuff do you have that is worth keeping that wouldn’t fit in one or two storage totes. I would think anything of sentimental value like pictures, art, trophies, books, paperwork etc would be quite small.
When I was moving into a dorm, a few totes would have been a lot of my available space. I'm pretty glad my parents would let me pick and choose before clearing stuff out. Saving my childhood stuffed animals or favorite books so I can share them with my own kids someday is pretty meaningful to me, same thing I remember my parents doing. I don't know if I would have had the correct perspective to make those choices as a university freshman. Unless you immediately downsize after becoming an empty nester you're going to have way more storage space than you need anyways.
As a father of 3 kids under 5, we bought our house 2.5 years ago and it has appreciated so much that had we saved every penny for the last 2.5 years we couldn't have afforded it today.
It doesn't matter how high performing your kids are if no good opportunities exist. So while we hope the world will allow our independent, high performance kids to succeed on their own, we're planning on having to provide unique opportunities via resources/connections ourselves to make that happen. Accordingly we're treating our house as something of a family estate, to be held in perpetuity and they can live in as long as it's good for them. It's not about keeping them as forever-children, it's about providing a base with a secure perimeter from which they can marshal their resources. For instance, we're right in the middle of two major metros. So if they land an unpaid/underpaid but prestigious internship in one of them, they won't have to worry about housing.
A very interesting and valid observation. You and your children are super fortunate and your approach seems like a very good hedge against some serious uncertainty coming up.
We weren’t quite in the same position until much later, and I am somewhat envious of your position. Best of luck!
Likewise, and I wasn't trying to invalidate your approach. Raising independent kids who understand the imperative of building their own lives is absolutely necessary regardless of economic conditions
Growing up, actual peak existence was visiting Grandma's house and playing with my mom's old toys. The seemingly unlimited, completely novel hoard from another time. My son feels similarly about visiting my parents' house and playing with my old toys. This may or may not be sustainable but it seems like it is well on its way with four generations involved- from where I stand, keeping a good pile of consumerism around to pay it forward in 20 years doesn't seem out of proportion with the joy I've received. It's definitely a culture thing- nobody in my family tree seems to move much, and has decent taste in throwing out the actual trash and keeping stuff stored nicely over the long time gaps, then not being fussy about the next generation being pretty hard on stuff (within reason, as appropriate for their age)
> My kids took “their” things with them when they became autonomous adults.
College students both are and are not autonomous adults. It's not really practical to bring all your stuff to college housing, and you don't always graduate into a good job market where you can go directly to the workforce and a nice place where all your stuff fits. Not everyone can afford to, and that's fine, but if you can give your kids an easier transition to full autonomy, it seems reasonable.
If moving while the kids are in college, it's nice to keep their stuff somewhere.
You're right that this is a generational thing, but the expectation for your kids to move out like this is also relatively recent: historically it was a lot more common for your children to continue to live with you, or if not, to live very nearby. Arguably one of the biggest reasons for the modern birthrate dropping is that lack of local family ties to help with childcare.
(And yeah, for college this just isn't practical: college accommodation is temporary, tiny, and students have practically no money. Taking all your stuff with you to college is a lot of effort for very little gain).
> My kids took “their” things with them when they became autonomous adults
No room for that in college dorms. I would wait until they graduate and have jobs.
They gave away my Charizard ;_;
> If my parents had done that I would have been pissed.
I was pretty pissed when I went off to college and my parents threw away my 80s computer that would now be considered a classic.
> Are you sure they even will want it back? Might be better to just donate it all now and save the money.
At 20-something after college, no, they probably don't want it.
When they are 40 or 50, they will desperately want it back.
> Are you sure they even will want it back?
75 y/o MIL is still fighting my wife to take her middle/highschool 'stuff' back to this day. She won't throw it out though.
Your wife should just pick it up and throw it out then to relieve her mother of the burden.
Yeah. My mom hung onto my old school stuff and finally wanted to get rid of it when she moved. I took it graciously with thanks, and then tossed it in the trash when I got home.
Probably not - but it isn't his decision, and the kids are not yet in a place in life where they can make the decision.
Until the kids figure out where their life will take them they can't know. I have some heirlooms that I'm really glad to have now, but when I was in college living in dorms I wouldn't have had space for them.
You have no clue what somebody else finds important and will throw the wrong things.
I definitely would have.
I'd understand if they really needed to get rid of it, but the conversation must be had!
My parents gave me my “crap” back and it went straight into the trash. When my kids moved out, their “crap” went to Goodwill or the trash.
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.
This is a difference in parenting approaches. For our kids, going to college, or in one case the military and another no college, was moving out. You have your approach, we had ours. They were perfectly capable and successful in figuring out their lives without flying back to the nest every summer.
Great that you and your kids had this privilege. A lot of college grads these days struggle to get a job, let alone one that pays enough to rent their own place not one shared with roommates. Honestly, your replies sound very condescending and tone-deaf.
I agree and understand part of what you are saying. I am not exactly sure what the privilege was, but I do understand your observation about the tone-deafness. It is for certain that current job outlook seems bleak and this is extremely difficult. In general, I admit I am very privileged in that I was able to live in a time when certain types of jobs were plentiful and there seemed to be limitless opportunities available to me.
On the other hand, I’m very glad my parents hung on to my stuff until I could take it back. I see no reason to throw it out.
My mom kept most of my books but threw out a rare box of Creative Computing magazines that all the world’s libraries wrongly decided were ephemeral crap.
> 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.
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’s such an annoying problem to solve.
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.
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.
Grandchildren.
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.
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!
As a data point, I counted all of the chairs at my parents' house. 44. 44 chairs. We thought it was hilarious, so we told my in-laws, and they counted chairs at their own home -- also 44!
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.
The Silent Generation had a standard of living, particularly among the working classes and rural folk, well below what millenials/GenZ are used to. They kept stuff, took good care of it to make it last as long as they could, jury-rigged things with what they could to conserve money, and so forth. No ordering cheap stuff from Temu, no electrical devices so cheap that they're disposable, no fast fashion, none of that. That submitter recently who broke apart a book for their own convenience probably would have been soundly thrashed for it. So, yeah, of course, at the end of their lives they wind up with a pile of worn out household items and what their grandchildren view as a hoarding problem. But one can hardly blame them.
We live in an era of immense wealth and convenience relative to them.
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!
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 ;)
Sure, only if you haul away the other 14 giant objects as well! And at least lie to me well enough that they will all go to a good home :)
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.
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.
Those parents will neither ask, nor accept the answer they hear.
> 1970s era stereo equipment
Some of what glitters _is_ gold!
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.
or brushed aluminium
If its falling apart its not good furniture.
A lot of old furniture is better than all but very expensive new stuff. My kids like my parents' and grandparents' furniture.
A lot of that old furniture was also very expensive stuff.
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.
It's just the ultimate procrastination. Like you can literally put this task (getting rid of junk) off for your whole life. Why wouldn't you?
> 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 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.
> 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.
So why don't you use it?
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...
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.
For most of human history, children very much would appreciate inheriting crafted goods. The kind of rampant, commoditized consumerism where we routinely snub our noses at and throw away perfectly useful goods is a rather recent trend.
For most of human history, children and parents lived together or close by, and parents died earlier in the child's life. If your parents died and left you an heirloom dining room table, it was quite likely you just didn't have a table, and at most you lived a few blocks away, so acquiring it was easy.
I'm in my 40s. Both my parents are alive, and have a house full of stuff. I live in a different house, 3.5 hours away at highway speeds, full of different stuff. It doesn't really matter to me if my parent's dining room table is a nicely crafted table - I have a nice table, and I don't need two dining room tables. Getting it to my house is a tremendous hassle. Picking between them is a tremendous hassle. And then I still have all the other stuff - the hutch, the chairs, the couches, the beds - and only one sibling to split them with.
"Rampant, commoditization consumerism" didn't cause this, longevity, freedom of movement, and independent living caused this, and I wouldn't trade those away for an heirloom table.
My parents aren't leaving me any crafted goods when they pass.
They had beautiful, carved wooden dressers and wardrobes from their parents that they, naturally, did not appreciate and take care of, so they turned into garbage and were thrown away when they became too dilapidated to move to another building. They were replaced with the standard fare particle-board-and-laminate Ikea-type trash that I definitely do not want. It's falling apart already and they've only had it a few years.
If they had maintained the furniture they were given by their parents, I would love to keep them around in my home and give them to my children when I pass, too. But I don't want cheap, mass-produced garbage from my parents simply because it belonged to my parents.
For most of human history we were riddled with parasites and children would appreciate being less riddled with parasites.
My wife and I are both the youngest in our families, and all of our extended family uses us as a dumping ground for stuff to they're too guilty to throw away or donate. About 10% of the time it's something actually useful, 90% we already have a better version of whatever it is or simply don't want or need it.
No, I'm not taking my father in law's perfectly good TV. I have a TV, and the one he bought was mediocre at best when it was new.
Here's a secret. If you have family members that you know struggle to throw stuff away, and they offer it to you, just take if their hands and dispose of it yourself.
It violates people's internal sense of morality in a strangely strong way to do that for whatever reason. It's a white lie but ultimately it's an act of kindness to take the electronic intercom from RadioShack that your father is pretty sure "just needs a new rheostat"
> No, I'm not taking my father in law's perfectly good TV. I have a TV, and the one he bought was mediocre at best when it was new.
Look, I'm not saying there aren't reasons for it. Obviously the economic value of a TV is now low. If you're posting on HN, chances are you can afford a new TV in a day's work, which may be less overhead than storing a TV for when you or someone else might need it in the future. At the same time, this is a historical abnormality. A television is a miracle device made with extremely advanced, relatively speaking, technology. 50 years ago, it would have been insane to snub your nose at that. To you it's a disposable good, to an older generation there is no reason to view it as such (and, I'd argue, this cultural value of disposability that is being forged is extremely bad and not actually sustainable for our society long-term).
All very true, but doesn't change the fact that my dad's house is more than 1000 sqft bigger than mine and when he goes I will have literally no place to put his stuff.
If you were living in 1992 and already had a good TV you probably would turn down something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpBMLFLjNx8
The point of the article is that most of what's being left is low economic value. When my great aunt died she had a collection of painted glass/plaster birds (not by any famous artist or anything, just mass produced stuff) that had been sitting in display cabinets for decades and nobody wanted.
It isn't an artifact of modernity that people don't want stuff like that. And as for stuff that is an artifact of modernity, the generation entering their 80s today lived through the widespread adoption of color TV, the moon landings, the space shuttle, cable TV, mainframes, PCs, CDs, VHS, DVDs, the internet, cellphones, smartphones, and freaking microwaves, never mind all the advancements in autos. You'd think someone with that lived experience would understand that times change and their kids might not want all their old stuff for the same reason it's been sitting unused in their garage/basement for decades.
My diagnosis is it was boomers who wrote the script for "The Goonies", specifically the line "Goonies never say die!". They came up in an era where rampant consumerism was encouraged and even directly subsidized as a political policy, hell it was how we beat the commies! Hard to be a good consumer past a certain point if you're too aware of your own mortality.
> The kind of rampant, commoditized consumerism where we routinely snub our noses at and throw away perfectly useful goods is a rather recent trend.
By and large the kids already have perfectly useful goods but no room for more.
Well for most of human history if you inherited something you inherited the building that contained that stuff. And the industry around it that used that stuff.
It’s the perfectly useless goods that are the problem.
These days the inheritance will include mostly junk. Old, worn out, low quality items, clothes, furniture, appliances, etc. Nobody says no to the one thing they need but can't afford, they say no to having yet another item they have no need for and its only value could be sentimental but otherwise it's a burden, one other thing among many to store somewhere, or throw out/donate/sell.
Do you need and can afford to keep somewhere another 6 creaky chairs, a big worn out dining table, bags of old clothes that don't fit anyone, outdated and broken electronics that probably don't work anymore, and so on? Even memories like pictures and videos are sometimes too much. They used to be a couple of photo albums, half with people you wouldn't even recognize, now there are TB of digital ones.
The US population is anxious [1]. The last thing an anxious person does is get rid of stuff they "might need one day".
> 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...
They're good for small/independent businesses who need to store a few things instead of renting a full space or have no spare storage at home.
When I moved to a big city from a medium sized town I had to put some stuff in storage while we lived in a small apartment and searched for a house to purchase. My bbq, lawn mower, other random stuff. Two months later I went to the office to move out and they couldn't find the paperwork. No one does that!
I rented one of these for a while after my wife and I moved in together. After a bit, I realized what we had paid for it was close to exceeding the value of the items stored within .
Just get rid of your stuff when you can. Life will be better.
Macys went out of business in Sacramento. In a built up area, near a movie theater grocery store mall etc. The best thing that could fill this multi floor space in a developed area is a storage unit.
Wendover made a nice video about this 10 months ago: https://youtu.be/uEVv8SOJ6Is?is=Er27clBvXZ4TzAlj
I'm a big Wendover fan, I think many here would like it.
I've seen a few American self storage units on Youtube and a lot of times their units are open at the top. Which blows my mind. All it takes is for one bad customer to setup a ladder and just loot whatever unit they want.
> A self-storage facility is a business that rents lockable space to people who own more stuff than they know what to do with
This has turned into another topic where people look down upon others or culture in general while assuming the worst.
Self-storage facilities can be really nice for those of us who like to live in areas where larger houses or garages aren't easy options. I can put the winter gear in there during the summer and the summer gear in there during the winter. If I need to renovate a part of the house, I can rent a storage unit for a few months and move that room's contents into it and free up space. When an older family member passes away and the estate needs to sell the house, moving the important belongings into a storage unit while the family works on dividing them up or selling them is something that happens all the time.
I don't currently have a unit, but when I was making a lot of trips to the self-storage place there were a lot of people doing all the things I mentioned above. I'm sure there are a lot of units with forgotten and unnecessary things that are basically hoarded because their owners can't let go, but I have to roll my eyes at articles that talk about it like an "American religion".
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 even the thought of paying a monthly fee to store junk gives me real anxiety.
I cancel netflix et all as soon as I subscribe. If I don't notice when it lapses, then I wasn't using it.
...you may be my long lost twin...
Since when does Netflix cost only $6? Anyhow, I am sorry but your logic of "trashing what's not used for a year" is extremely aggressive, unreasonably so. 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 too.
Yes, one should donate/dispose what's never going to be needed, but the criteria have to be more discerning than a simple one year limit. I think ten years is a better limit, although I easily have worthwhile unused items going back further.
The price of the lowest tier Netflix subscription in Japan is ¥890, which works out to a little under $6 with the current exchange rate.
I did say there were some exceptions to the rule.
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.
Its interesting in America because we are both a very throw away society but also want to keep everything.
It's to the point where whenever I see vacant land being cleared around me in NY, I assume it's for a new storage facility.
> 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 but that young people for some time have referred to derisively as “brown.”
This is madness talking. A nice "brown" bookcase or dresser is made of solid wood and will last your entire life. The alternative these days is either insanely priced and still of questionable quality or cheap, badly constructed particleboard that outgasses formaldehyde and other toxins into your home and needs to be replaced every few years.
There used to be a much larger amount of inexpensive high quality furniture on the second hand market, but now its harder to find locally. If you have kids who are allergic to the color brown, you should donate any good furniture you have. Someone will absolutely want it.
>larger amount of inexpensive high quality furniture on the second hand market,
There is no second hand market, it's just a used primary market.
Before the invention of the internet getting rid of second hand items meant tossing it, or selling it at a garage sale, or for more expensive things taking out an (pretty expensive) ad in the paper. This had a lot of friction. Sellers also had any real idea of what their items were worth. Stuff ranged from wildly expensive to impossibly cheap.
The internet broke this. If I post something too cheap, in seconds a bot picks it up and a person that retails stuff buys it up. Then 30 minute later you find the same item on the same forum for way more. This has a second order effect that these high price posts sit in the forum for long periods of time, so when Jon shows up to sell his table, he sees 50 other tables to $200 and thinks that's an appropriate price. Good deals appear to no longer exist!
These flippers fancy themselves "liquidity providers". Like god forbid it take a couple days for someone to bite on your "too cheap" listing.
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
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.
So much stuff and so little soul.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
It is very interesting that in most big cities around the world, but especially Europe having a car is a big luxury while in the US homeless people have cars.
And that per capita Europe has a bigger unhoused problem than the United States. There aren't simple solutions, because the real solutions would change how society needs to work. Maybe less about money and more about the right to survive or something.
Not all European countries. There are 20 European countries bellow the per 100.000 level of homelessness than the US.
If you want to split up Europe to make the comparison favorable, split up the US to make it less favorable again. How many US states are below the per capita level of homelessness in the US?
Ok fine I went and calculated the aggregate numbers and indeed the homelessness per capita in Europe (EU) is higher than the US
EU:
1.1 million homeless people https://www.feantsa.org/files/Themes/Overview/2025/ex_summar...
Divided by a population of 451,990,314 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_U...
= 0.00243
US:
745,652 homeless people https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2025-...
Divided by a population of 341,784,857 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
= 0.00218
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.
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, 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 increasingly 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.
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.
At my current place (apartment in a suburb about 10km from the city center) our parking would cost ~180 USD per month. From a tech worker perspective it is not like unaffordable, but definetily a luxury for most of the population. The median after-tax income in Sweden is like 3k USD.
That tax I mentioned before also makes very old beat-up cars not worth keeping (which is the intent of the tax to be fair).
One of the main upsides of living in a detached 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.
The issue in America is that you can own a car, not pay for upkeep, not pay registration, not pay for insurance, not pay to park and still drive it many times without consequence.
That's a feature, not a bug.
The opening of your comment is a nice buzzword bingo for people of a certain bent.
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.
The tent cities and the rows of campers are a different story (i.e. the density is the problem).
"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
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.
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.
I find little of interest in that. The US enforces private property in a far more aggressive manner than most other countries, and the definition of public property, and functional amount thereof, are also very different. Merely laying down behind a bush can be a violation of "Illegal Camping within City Limits"/
Additionally, rent can easily be inaccessible for the employed. And for those who don't have vehicles, 'just moving to a cheaper area" is not a practical option.
One problem that poorer American people have is too much food, leading to obesity.
Do they have too much food? It seems to me that calorically dense foods that provide almost no nutritional value are “cheap” and abundant while healthy food choices are expensive and require time and effort to store and prep.
For example, if I’m living out of a car I’m more likely to use EBT to buy some bags of chips I can toss in the car rather than some cheap chicken and fresh veggies or eggs. How would I store chicken or cook any of it if I live in a car?
Yes, I know there are solutions here like small fridges and hot plates. But those cost money and require time and effort. Again, scenario is living in a car or the streets.
Btw calorically dense foods are, in fact, hyper nutritious. While you may imagine healthy foods to be green vegetables and raw meats, you can buy - from regular supermarkets - roast chickens ready to eat, salad bowls and fresh fruit. You need not even store it, but buy and eat on the go.
People repeat the myth that healthy food choices are expensive (they aren't) and time & space consuming to make (they can be) so often that most people believe it. But it just isn't so: you can eat at McDonalds every day, and if it's only a part of your diet, it's healthy. If you can get fibre and some vitamins elsewhere, and aren't overeating, the protein and calories in a fries and a hamburger are fine. Good, actually.
Healthy foods are simply principally marketed to, sold at a large markup to, middle to upper class Americans so they believe that's the usual market value.
Now, it can be expensive in time, effort and equipment for struggling, hard working, irregular shift workers. That's a different issue though.
You are correct, but regular supermarkets can even be scarce or non-existent in many areas.
Also known as food deserts.
Cars have space. A camp stove in the trunk and you can cook anything. Likewise a cooler and you can store things for a short time. Since you have a car you can drive to a supermarket regularly and thus not need to store anything for longer than the cooler can keep them fresh.
Food deserts don't exist if you have a car in any American city since it is never that far to a suburb. (if you don't have a car getting is much much harder)
I have done the above - as a contractor working in a place a significant distance from home on a short term job. There were a lot of people like me in the cheap hotels I was staying at. OTOH, none of us were homeless - the homeless generally have other issues making them homeless and so even though that options would be cheap and work that doesn't mean they would be able to do it
> Yes, I know there are solutions here like small fridges and hot plates. But those cost money and require time and effort. Again, scenario is living in a car or the streets.
There's at least one benefit to China dumping solar cells and other stuff all over the world: even as a homeless person... at least as long as you got a car, an EcoFlow Glacier and a shit solar panel are less than a grand, and it provides both a refrigerator, a small freezer and a way to keep your devices charging.
A thousand dollars may as well be a million dollars. In my personal experience, gifting a thousand dollars to someone in housing distress will not lead to the purchase of a solar panel.
I'm talking about "working homeless" here. There are many people living out of their cars because they can't afford a proper home but still have money they can spend, and many of them in fact are living some kind of "stealth camper" setup with accompanying gear.
But that gear would have been infeasible even ten years ago - the status quo outside of luxury campers for six figures was absorber refrigeration [1] that needs a heat source - either powered by natural gas, which has challenges relating to safety as well as high consumption, or by electricity, which was lead-acid batteries back then.
The power density of lithium cells today is what makes that possible in the first place.
Poverty-homeless people however are a different thing, agreed on that. If you don't have a lockable place to store stuff you might as well have nothing at all...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator
Got it. I mainly work with people who have severely fallen off the cliff with almost no way to climb back out. I totally see how this new gear could keep someone from reaching a critical breaking point.
One problem with what? Also, a problem is not “too much food”. This is an absurd statement. The problem is non nutritive, unhealthy food loaded with calories. Work in any troubled urban center and you will encounter a complete lack of actual grocery stores selling healthy food. Instead you get fast food, bodegas and convenience stores selling low quality, cheap items. We have known of this problem for decades. The poor are poor and certainly don’t have the income for “too much food”.
Cheap carbs and starches but expensive vegetables and protein sources.
Required link I always leave in these discussions:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.
> IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.
It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around. You go around and the music stops. Everyone scrambles to their nearest chair. Obviously the person on crutches will be the first to fall out of the game. The rest then talk about laziness, drugs, bootstraps, and all the rest. But add 1 more chair and there's no problem, even the dude with the broken leg can sit.
Someone tried to build the extra chair but the endless required studies and legal challenges from existing chair-sitters bankrupted the would-be chair builder.
Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
> Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Maybe you need 5 chairs? Here in SF supply has fallen decades behind the demand curve to the point it may be impossible to catch up even if all you did was build build build.
POSIWID
decades of reasonable, consistently applied housing policy led to the creation of islands of wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty. ergo, this is the purpose. this is how the people there want to live. I left many years ago when I realized the futility of it all.
Excellent use of posiwid
I call SF and Silicon Valley “the world’s only slum for the rich.”
What buys you a trap house or an apartment with hallways that smell like piss in SF or the Valley will buy you a mansion in 90% of the country at least.
It's a death by a thousand cuts situation.
Everyone wants to blame existing landowners and sure they share part of it but the lion's share of the blame ought to be directed at do-gooders (land owning or otherwise) who are unwilling to be honest (with themselves, or in the internet comments) and admit that every policy that "looks good" based on the one sided statements presented in abstract by its peddlers.
Each one of those policies is part of the system that gets us the results we have and the peddlers all share in the blame.
Surely at least part of it is the concentration of wealth and economic activity. There's large masses of decaying rural towns where houses are cheap, but at the same time the whole reason they're decaying is because there just isn't enough economic opportunity to afford even these cheap houses.
I have no clue what the overall balance of housing looks like, but surely it doesn't help that big chunks of the housing market are being deprecated at the same time.
I always sound YIMBY but yes, that’s another part of it.
The economy has hyper-concentrated in a small number of cities and regions.
Telework has helped a little bit to reverse it, but it’s nowhere near enough and it only works for some industries and roles.
Yeah. I like how Kat Woods phrased it: "You can give the slowest child sprinting lessons, but there are still nine chairs."
They really do this. They give subsidies to people to be able to afford homes when there’s insufficient supply.
Huge surprise: it makes prices go up. More money chasing the same goods.
We will do literally anything to fix housing shortages but build housing.
Of course now we’ve decided to start dumb penis length measuring contest trade wars with our main suppliers of raw building materials. That will help.
Well, for generations now, exponential growth in all things has been state policy and it was good (tm). Because of population growth, there's always a shortage of housing. Population is projected to peak this century. Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?
> Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?
In many places in Europe and Asia, the govt will essentially pay you to go live in near-abandoned villages and revitalize them.
In USA it’s just ghost towns. See also Detroit
The problem is better described as "There aren't enough homes where people want to live". We have plenty of houses, even in america. The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby). So everyone resists building.
But it's okay, if you resist building for long enough then your town will eventually collapse and your house will be worth nothing anyway. Many american Towns are essentially insolvent and can't afford realistic upkeep prices for services like sewage, roads, good schools, etc., and are living on borrowed time until infrastructure collapses and nobody wants to buy there. See Strong Towns the book.
> The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby).
Infrastructure is a major deal. You can't really exist as a member of modern society without broadband Internet, unless you're Amish or whatever and even they have begun to shift attitudes. Starlink changed the calculation quite a bit, and it definitely helps, but other things such as cellphone reception and emergency services that arrive in a reasonable time are also important.
> It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around.
Actually, there are. In Germany for example, we have millions of units left empty... the catch is, these are in (extremely) rural areas. Areas that used to be populated, but no longer are because the government has let them fall extremely behind in modern amenities. Some even do not have cellphone service.
Normally, you'd expect people and companies to do a pricing arbitrage and move where housing is cheap, but unfortunately, when there is no local employment or the infrastructure does not support remote employment, or other crucial requirements (safe potable water, electrical grid, grocery stores, schools, some sort of entertainment) are lacking, this does not work out any more.
So it’s not just me then. I’m not crazy.
See I’ve had this insane wild idea for years that homelessness could be related to inadequate housing supply.
Wild I know. People not having something being related to not enough of that thing.
But we have to stop those developers! If there’s ever a food shortage will people be saying “stop greedy farmers?”
Actually they probably will. Not enough food so obviously farmers are causing it and it’s a conspiracy. I’m sure that’s what the TikTok slop and Xhitter rage bait would say.
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.
600 sq ft is about the size of my apartment, which at market rate is about $3k/mo.
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.
There was a study done in Los Angeles and found that 80% of garages are used for storage with the car parked outside.
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.
Oh, people already do that here too. The storage unit is the next bucket of overflow.
Great business model but terrible thing to actually use. If you have so much junk you need a storage unit, you probably need to declutter. Most people have too much junk.
On the other hand, new homes are not being built and this may be a way to compensate for so many people still acquiring the same level of junk but not owning enough homes or space to store it all. Previous generations wouldn’t have had as much of an issue when real estate was much cheaper.
It must be valuable if an earlier version of myself bought it kept it found it or stored it
Viewable from the commuter train (BART), there is a large storage facility in Oakland which advertises air conditioned units. Outside is a large homeless encampment. Sigh.
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.
tl;dr; version:
While 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.
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.
People can get unusually attached to their stuff regardless of its objective value.
> 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.
Even without the sentimental part, cancelling means sorting everything out and finding people to take it away.
In theory, one can just hand the keys to a Junk Busters-type company. But yeah - actually doing that is another barrier to action.
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?