During the summer of 2019, not long before COVID shut the country down, I spent three and a half days driving from Connecticut, where I live, to Kansas City, where I grew up, and three and a half days driving back. My routes in both directions were lazy and circuitous, and they included not even one mile of interstate highway. I ate roast turkey with all the trimmings at a restaurant in upstate New York that offers Thanksgiving dinner every day of the year; stood at the northern end of a puddle representing the Dead Sea in a grassy park created, a century and a half ago, as a walk-over relief map of the Holy Land; saw surprisingly many sex-toy superstores near billboards promoting belief in Jesus Christ; and visited the birthplace of the Western novelist Zane Grey, who, it turns out, was also a minor-league baseball player and a practicing dentist, and whose real first name was Pearl. Mainly, though, I spent long hours alone in my car thinking about our remarkable country. By the time I got home, I had concluded, based on a multitude of examples, that the two great pillars of American culture are church and self-storage.
A self-storage facility is a business that rents lockable space to people who own more stuff than they know what to do with. (A 2022 survey by the Craftsman tool division of Stanley Black & Decker found that more than a third of the country’s residential garages were so full of overflow possessions that their owners were unable to park cars in them.) “The history of self-storage probably goes back a long way, but the seventies is when it really got started, mostly with mom-and-pop-type operations,” Patrick Lemp, an appraiser and broker who focusses on the industry, told me. “Later, it became an accepted institutional-quality asset class.”
The United States is the world leader, with roughly ninety per cent of global capacity. Texas, of the fifty states, has the most facilities, Hawaii the fewest. Among cities, New York ranks third, after Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, although on a per-capita basis many smaller municipalities are comparably served. Reno, Nevada, is home to a number of operations that pick up, store, and redeliver tents, chairs, bicycles, and other gear for repeat Burning Man attendees, and Wichita, Kansas, was once named the Self-Storage Capital of the U.S. Units range from closet-size to cavernous, including spaces that are large enough to hold entire houses.
Most of the facilities I saw on my road trip were single-story structures with lots of closely spaced roll-up metal doors; some, owned or operated by national chains such as Public Storage, Extra Space Storage, and CubeSmart, looked like office buildings. According to the co-founder and C.E.O. of Neighbor, an industry marketplace that works like Airbnb, 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.
People who work in self-storage often say that their market is driven by “the four D’s”: death, displacement, divorce, and downsizing, all life events that entail sudden collisions between stuff accumulation and reality. Years ago, Paul Roossin, an A.I. technologist and former neuroscientist, moved from a house in the suburbs to an apartment in Manhattan, and, because he thought he might want to move back to the suburbs someday, he rented a twenty-by-forty-foot storage space in Queens, for things that he no longer had room for. The facility was accessible by subway, and he visited from time to time. “Literally, though, years would pass,” he told me. Among the items he stored were a synthesizer, a piano, and a Hammond organ. At some point, he donated all three to a nonprofit, and once they were no longer blocking his view of the interior of his unit he was reminded of possessions that he had forgotten he owned. He later downsized from his downsizing, over a period of months, with help from a friend.
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 but that young people for some time have referred to derisively as “brown.” My wife and I moved from a large house to a smaller one a few years ago, and, as we were debating what to get rid of, we rented a portable storage unit from a company called Pods. Our pod cost about a hundred and fifty dollars a month, plus pickup and drop-off fees, and we kept it for a couple of months. (We also could have paid the company to store it for us, indefinitely, at one of its big warehouses.) Our plan was to fill it with redundant household items, including furniture that we no longer had room for, and send it to our daughter and her family, who live a hundred and fifty miles away. We did eventually send it to her, although she was interested in so few of our things that we had trouble filling it. Two items she did want—an Eames chair that had belonged to my father and a mid-century Danish desk that had belonged to my wife’s parents—I wouldn’t have minded keeping, but by that point I was so relieved that she wanted anything at all that I happily parted with them.
The most American of America’s recent contributions to the global built environment—joining Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, domed Byzantine churches, and so forth—are the fulfillment centers of major retail corporations. The buildings are easy to spot from the air, because they’re immense, low, rectangular, flat-roofed, windowless, and, typically, clustered in industrial parks near airports and other transportation hubs. Self-storage facilities are almost always smaller, and they’re less likely to be encircled by eighteen-wheelers, but they’re similar in design and construction. Recently, it occurred to me that the ideal place to open a self-storage facility might be in the middle of one of those industrial parks, surrounded by fulfillment centers. That way, when you bought something from Amazon, it could be delivered directly to your storage unit, bypassing your cluttered home and sparing you the embarrassment of not remembering what you’d ordered the day before.
My friend Ray Underwood used to run an excavation company founded by his father. (I once watched him use a backhoe to retrieve a ballpoint pen that a health-department official had accidentally dropped into a deep test hole. He brought it up in one try, along with maybe a teaspoonful of dirt.) Underwood also owned a good-sized piece of commercial property in our town, on which he built a gas station and convenience store. He was thinking about adding a car wash, but a friend told him that he really ought to build a self-storage facility. This was in the nineties, before real-estate investment trusts and private-equity firms had fully appreciated the cash-cow potential of housing people’s stuff, so there weren’t many similar facilities around. Winning zoning approval wasn’t easy—partly my fault; I was on the commission—but eventually he got permits, in three phases, for six prefabricated metal buildings.
Underwood’s facility contains a hundred and forty-five units, varying in size from twenty-five to three hundred square feet. “In the third phase, we added mostly ten-by-thirties, because people kept asking for bigger and bigger,” he told me. Most of his customers store what you’d expect: ordinary garage overflow, gently used exercise equipment, out-of-season sporting goods, and furniture made superfluous by moving, renovation, or winter. About a quarter of the customers are local contractors or business owners, who store small machinery, tools, supplies, merchandise, or paperwork that they’re legally required to hang on to.
The smallest units go for about eighty dollars a month, the largest for about three hundred. The facility has a website, but if you want to learn about rates or reserve a unit you have to call or e-mail Underwood’s sole employee, who is married to a former resident state trooper and used to be the town’s treasurer. If you don’t live or work nearby, she may ask you a few questions. (An occasional issue for self-storage operators is people who rent units with no intention of paying for them, in order to get rid of stuff that would be expensive to dispose of properly.)
The buildings require virtually no maintenance. “It’s as simple as I could make it,” Underwood said.
Newer self-storage facilities are often bigger, fancier, and more technologically advanced. Recently, I visited a four-year-old Extra Space location in Wildwood, Florida, an hour northwest of Orlando. It’s one of many facilities on the outskirts of the vast, golf-cart-dependent gerontopolis known as the Villages, which covers nearly sixty square miles in three counties, has some two hundred and fifty pickleball courts, offers live music and walker-friendly dancing every night of the week, and is growing as fast as the universe is expanding. People who retire to the Villages almost always come from houses where they had more space, and if they don’t off-load their surplus possessions before they move they need a place to stash them.
Kerry Copeland, who oversees twenty Extra Space locations in that part of Florida, showed me around. “There are about seven hundred and fifty units here, all climate-controlled,” he said. The building is three stories tall, and customers can drive right into it by means of a ground-level tunnel. Some of the biggest units open directly onto the tunnel and are large enough to park trucks in. Copeland punched a code into a keypad, and we rode an elevator to the second floor. Motion-activated lights came on as we walked through a maze of air-conditioned aisles.
Fire sprinklers were visible overhead. Every surface was pristine. Almost all the units we passed were rented.
Something I didn’t encounter during my tour with Copeland was other human beings. (People who have storage units tend to visit them about as often as they visit elderly relatives in nursing homes.) Earlier that day, I’d stopped by a competing facility, a few miles away, where I did see some renters—an older couple who had parked their pickup truck in front of a row of non-climate-controlled units. They had opened the doors of two of them, and the man, who wasn’t wearing a shirt, was talking on his phone and using his free hand to move stuff around.
The woman was only intermittently visible, behind tall, jumbled piles: Christmas decorations, including an artificial tree and a toddler-size nutcracker-type figure; two big grills, one charcoal and one propane; a compound miter saw and an assortment of other large power tools; several plastic garment bags; hard-to-identify pieces of folding furniture, probably chairs. The bed of their truck contained what looked like a radio-controlled toy car, so it’s possible that they were either preparing for or recovering from a visit by grandchildren.
Many of the items that the couple had stored were of the type that people keep in basements, but the high water table in most of Florida makes basements a rarity. A useful tip I got from Copeland is that, if you expect to visit your unit reasonably often, or if you’ve hired other people to fill it for you, it makes sense to rent one that’s larger than the volume of your possessions, so that you have room to maneuver. I can confirm from experience that this is sound advice. A few years ago, my wife and her siblings moved their mother from a large one-bedroom apartment to a single room, and they rented a storage unit to hold her surplus stuff while they debated what to do next. Everything fit, barely, but removing items from the back was like working a Rubik’s Cube.
One of the most significant innovations in the world of finance has been the automatically recurring credit-card charge. Like many people, I never pay bills anymore in the old-fashioned sense of sitting down at the dining-room table with a month’s worth of ominous-looking envelopes, a letter opener, a checkbook, and a roll of stamps. Fees for my phone, internet, streaming services, media subscriptions, in-car satellite radio, trash pickup, post-office box, cloud storage, and who knows what else all quietly appear on one or another of my credit-card statements. Other monthly payments, including car loans, electric bills, and Medicare and Medigap fees, disappear automatically from what I still think of as my checking account, even though I hardly ever write checks.
Enabling people to pay for things without consciously paying for them is good for the business of many businesses. Last year, two professors from Stanford and one from Texas A. & M. published a paper in the American Economic Review in which they conclude, based on transaction data from a large payment-card network, that “cancellation frictions roughly double seller revenues on average.” In large part, this is because credit and debit cards have made it easier for people to become what the professors call “inertial consumers.” An increasingly popular remedy for such people, they point out, is using services that “help subscribers find and cancel unwanted subscriptions”—for a subscription fee, of course.
Cancellation frictions are a boon to the self-storage industry. The annoying, time-consuming, and often expensive chore of emptying a junk-filled storage unit is easy to postpone for a month, and then for one more, especially if an unnerving paper bill never arrives. (Some facilities increase retention by offering discounts for automatic payments, or requiring them outright. Credit-card billing also makes it easier for customers to overlook rate increases.) 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.
Sometimes customers simply stop paying. One of the attractions of self-storage as a business is that evicting stuff is easier than evicting people. A facility owner can overlock a delinquent unit and, after meeting certain statutory requirements, sell the abandoned contents at a public auction. This past spring, at the Inside Self-Storage World Expo, an annual trade show in Las Vegas, I met Chris Rosa, the director of business development at StorageTreasures, one of many companies that conduct such auctions. He told me that he had originally planned to become a high-school history teacher, but after graduating from college he worried that teaching didn’t offer enough financial security and decided to become an auctioneer instead. He attended auction school (“mind-numbingly boring”) and is now licensed in twenty-five states.
In 2010, while Rosa was learning the art of “bid calling”—the rhythmic patter that auctioneers use to keep bidders bidding—the reality show “Storage Wars” premièred, on A&E. “Behind these doors are some of the world’s best-kept treasures,” a voice-over on the show says. “But when storage bills go unpaid the contents within are put up for auction.” In an early episode, father-and-son bidders named Darrell and Brandon discover that buried deep in an unpromising-looking unit they’ve just bought for a hundred and forty-five dollars is a pair of handmade boots worn by Shelley Duvall in the movie “Popeye,” accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
An acquaintance who buys and sells movie props tells them that the boots are worth at least fifteen hundred dollars—a tenfold return on their investment. Windfalls like that made some viewers believe that buying other people’s forsaken stuff could be an easy path to riches. “At my first storage auctions, three, four, or five people would show up,” Rosa said. “Two weeks later, it was ten people. By the end of the year, at the height of the show, it was a hundred and fifty.”
The auctions on “Storage Wars,” which is now in its eighteenth season, are conducted in person, on the premises, but in recent years almost all non-reality-show auctions have taken place online. Whether the auctions are live or virtual, people bidding on a unit can examine its contents only from the outside, without opening boxes or rummaging around, and if they win they have to clear out everything. Genuine treasures do turn up, but auction winners inevitably discover that someone who has stopped paying the rent on a five-by-ten wasn’t using it to store gold bullion and that, for every certified pair of Olive Oyl boots, there are bushels of broken toys, outdated computer cables, spit-up-stained baby clothes, and greasy car parts, all of which they have to haul away. The regular bidders on “Storage Wars,” whom the producers tend to portray as scheming rivals, are experienced at judging and unloading junk, since many of them have run secondhand stores, consignment shops, auction companies, or other resale outlets. They also have trucks.
Last year, a retired Episcopal priest I know was asked to perform an exorcism at a storage facility. “A man told me after church one Sunday that for a couple of weeks he had felt an evil physical presence on his chest in bed at night, and that it was trying to kill him,” he said. The man also heard noises in the walls, at home and at work, and he had decided that the cause was a demon inhabiting an antique wardrobe he had bought: a large piece of brown. The Episcopal Church’s “Book of Occasional Services” has a section on exorcisms, which priests can perform as a last resort in certain circumstances.
The man’s situation didn’t qualify, but the liturgy for “Celebration for a Home,” in the same book, includes the invocation “Let the mighty power of the Holy God be present in this place to banish from it every unclean spirit.” The priest and a colleague went from room to room in the man’s house, reading prayers from that liturgy and sprinkling holy water, and then did the same in his storage unit, to which he had banished the wardrobe. His wife later told the priest that her husband had felt relief for a few days, but that the real cause of his torment had probably been a brain tumor.
Five years ago, self-storage was one of the most profitable segments of the real-estate industry, with higher annual returns than multifamily housing, office complexes, and retail stores. Growth and revenues got a big boost from COVID, partly because people who were trapped at home suddenly realized that they needed to make room for remote working, remote schooling, and staying out of one another’s way. (A sixth D might be disease.) So many new facilities were built that some of the most desirable markets are now saturated or close to it, but people still buy stuff that they don’t have room for, and rising mortgage rates have forced many people to defer plans to move into larger living spaces.
Speakers at the Inside Self-Storage expo sessions that I sat in on were divided in their assessments of the industry’s near-term prospects, but they all agreed that technology and A.I. have become increasingly important. Andrew Capranos, the president (at the time) of a self-storage company based in North Carolina, said, “There is nothing that I can do better than A.I.” Facility owners use it to determine what their competitors are charging, and developers use it to streamline their permit applications. Technology is transforming the management side, too. A customer can now often price, rent, and access a unit using just a phone, without interacting directly with another person—a make-or-break feature for many younger renters.
Armaan Premjee, whom I also met at the expo, owns two self-storage facilities, in Texas and Louisiana, and, with the help of A.I., he can run them from Barcelona, where he now lives. “Claude handles our rental-rate increases,” he told me. He also uses A.I. to answer phone calls and e-mails. New tenants receive an automated text containing their unit’s padlock combination. Premjee pays people to check the properties once a month. (Break-ins are an issue in some areas, especially outside the prime markets. A profitable sideline for a growing number of facility owners is selling personal-property protection.)
Premjee was born in California in 1997, grew up in Mumbai, moved back to the U.S. for college, and earned a graduate business degree in London. He told me that he had become interested in real estate after Googling “how to get rich” and that his father had helped him make his first purchase, a small commercial lot, which he bought for twenty-six hundred dollars and sold three days later for forty-four hundred. More deals followed. “I knew flipping was a good way to make active income,” he told me. “But I needed something that made me money in my sleep.” Self-storage appealed to him, he said, partly because it didn’t involve “toilets and tenants.”
I asked Premjee whether he saw possibilities for growth in Europe, where, compared with Americans, people are less likely to accumulate excessive quantities of stuff. “I think there’s a massive opportunity,” he said. The average home in Europe is half the size of the average home in the U.S., and Amazon delivers there, too. (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.”) “When they look at the U.S., they kind of laugh,” Premjee continued. “Europeans are getting double the rent per square foot.” There are also opportunities in Asia and the Middle East. Premjee recently visited a multistory facility in Dubai. “It had a huge staff on site, and they did valet storage, with pickup and drop-off,” he said. “There were eight or ten people in the office just doing sales and customer-support issues. And, to give you an idea of the rents there, a ten-by-twenty goes for seven hundred dollars a month, and they’re ninety-eight per cent occupied.”
Inside Self-Storage was founded in 1991 by Troy Bix, who had previously worked as a classified-ad salesman. In 2017, convinced that the golden age of self-storage had passed, he sold the company. “I’m not that smart, but I listen to my grandkids,” he told me. “And they don’t give a shit about hanging on to stuff.” At any rate, Bix is still a prominent figure at the expo. I met him at a booth promoting his current enterprise, Toy Storage Nation, which he founded in 2020 as the “voice of the RV and boat storage industry.” Sales of R.V.s and boats surged during COVID, because the pandemic made many other forms of vacationing difficult, but first-time purchasers often discovered that their homeowners’ associations prohibited them from keeping their new toys in their driveways or yards. According to an information sheet that Bix and his wife were handing out, the U.S. now has forty-eight hundred dedicated R.V.-and-boat-storage facilities and more than twenty-eight thousand hybrid facilities. Toy Storage Nation conducts seminars, produces podcasts, and advises owners, operators, and potential investors. Bix said, “They’re building half a million new boats and R.V.s a year now, and seventy per cent of them are beholden to an H.O.A. Ding!”
Among the more recent additions to the storage universe are car condos, which are units capacious enough to fit entire toy collections. They frequently include what are known in the industry as mezzanines, upper levels outfitted like living spaces. When I was young, my father owned a succession of serious R.V.s, the last of which was thirty-five feet long and had features that he had designed, among them cup holders large enough for liquor bottles. He parked it on a thick concrete pad that he’d had added to the end of our driveway. (No H.O.A. in our neighborhood.) 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.
The fanciest car condos sell for well over a million dollars, even though they’re often just big metal boxes. A developer I met in Florida showed me photos of a huge one whose owner used it to store and display his collection of German sports cars, one of which he’d mounted on a wall, like a decoration. The unit had a kitchen, a bathroom, a wet bar, and a carpeted mezzanine that included an office, a pair of Formula 1 racing simulators, a zebra-skin rug, a pool table, a sitting area, and a tripod-mounted rifle that seemed to be aimed at a big-screen TV. Katherine D’Agostino, who lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and owns a consulting firm called Self-Storage Ninjas, told me, “The first really crazy car condo I ever saw was at a facility called Monte Carlo Garage Suites, in Indian Land, South Carolina. I told the owner it was amazing, and he said, ‘This is just the one my wife knows about.’ ”
D’Agostino has an M.B.A. from the University of Nebraska, and she used to own a housecleaning business. “I grew the revenue to, like, $1.3 million a year, but I got tired of employees calling me at 10 P.M. to tell me they were sick or their grandma had died,” she said. D’Agostino sold the cleaning business, built storage facilities in Nebraska, Illinois, and Texas, and learned so much about the industry that she began doing feasibility studies for others. She’s now developing “small-bay flex” spaces, which are similar in construction to self-storage buildings but are occupied by small businesses and light manufacturers—coffee roasters, last-mile deliverers, microbrewers, plumbing contractors, the occasional gastropub. D’Agostino’s business partner is a self-storage designer from Wisconsin, who showed me renderings for an upscale facility that they’re hoping to build. I would describe the structure as a strip mall reconceived by a storage ninja. He and D’Agostino are pursuing sites for two separate projects near the Villages.
One afternoon during the expo, I boarded a bus for a field trip to an R.V.-and-boat facility next to a Love’s Travel Stop, about twenty-five miles from the Strip. It’s directly across Highway 93 from Apex Regional Landfill, which covers roughly two thousand acres and, at the area’s current rate of stuff-dumping, is said to have two hundred and fifty years’ worth of remaining capacity. During the bus ride, I sat across the aisle from a talkative man in his early sixties who was wearing a big hat. I overheard him telling someone next to him that he’d had a liver transplant and was “making up for lost time” by building a storage facility in Virginia for two hundred R.V.s.
The site we visited had been built by a company called Baja Carports. It consisted of ten covered but unenclosed structures of various sizes on a seven-and-a-half-acre asphalt lot adjacent to the truck stop. The facility had its own security fence, gated entrance, and office. A man from California, who was used to dealing with that state’s stringent environmental regulations, asked how the facility handled oil leaks in its drainage system, and the manager said, in effect, “Come on, man! This is Las Vegas!” (The facility is flanked by desert.) Three of the structures had solar panels on the roof—a Baja specialty—and the manager said that they produced enough electricity to meet most of the needs of the truck stop while also providing a five-amp trickle charge for many of the tenants.
Almost all the toys parked at Love’s were R.V.s, plus an assortment of boats, trucks, and cars. The shade provided by the canopies made the spaces noticeably cooler than the uncovered pavement, which felt hot enough to melt truck tires. The man with the hat and the new liver told me that, if it had been up to him, he would have installed vertical shading along the western end of the lot, too, to block the setting sun. I walked around with identical twin sisters from Alabama, one a lawyer and the other a real-estate broker. They told me that they were getting ready to take over three storage facilities owned by their father, a developer, who had been occupied for some time with buildings of his that were severely damaged by thunderstorms and a tornado in 2025. The sisters had come to Las Vegas to listen to experts and gather ideas. Self-storage isn’t necessarily the bonanza that it has been at certain times in the past, but they were by no means the only attendees I met who believe that there are still fortunes to be made.
“We’re a stuff society,” the lawyer twin said. ♦