Posted by pseudolus 5 days ago
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.
This is also why some startups trying to revolutionize the self storage model had extreme headwinds - if you are renting the underlying properties and trying to make the storage business profitable you are at an extreme disadvantage to the larger players who can subsidize operating costs with portfolio appreciation.
The whole reason why the Catholic Church doesn't allow priests to be married anymore was because it used to be that the individual churches were mostly the property of the priest, and would be passed down generationally (with some restrictions). The church phased in the ban on marriage so that over time, the churches would all in up in the estate of a priest with no heirs, where they'd become the property more formally of the Catholic Church proper. Today the Catholic Church is the single largest landowner in the world, with about 170 million acres.
More recent religious organizations have taken note of that, with LDS owning about 2.4M acres.
From my readings, one can always debate whether this reason for celibacy is whole or not (of course, more holy reasons were given, like purity of the ritual among others), but avoiding inheritance from father to sons was certainly a big factor. By barring heirs from the equation, it solved the whole dispute over inheritance. Yet, when it comes to clerical office and priesthood, "property" is not quite right, since it's mostly about usufruct and benefices, moreso. Which can be significant assets, that goes without saying, hence the Church did everything it could, for holy and not-so-holy-reasons, that traditional generational transmission does not apply. No next generation, no problem.
Quite importantly to the Roman Catholic Church, they wanted to avoid dynasties of priests that would grow in importance and out of their control, so they did whatever they could (ban marriage and fatherhood) so that a mis-aligned priest would only be a temporary nuisance to the Institution.
A lot went into this short burst of investigation, like the fact that early Churches were private property of land-owners, building churches for indulgences and power, reinforcing their ties with the Church, and I may dig deeper. Thanks for your comment again, if you have some references you recommend, I'd appreciate you share them!
If you mean I did, yes, I have, to begin with, to get an overview and links. But to do any of the reading or to write my comment? No. What's wrong with that?
Most restaurants in Europe generate an average of 250k in net cash flow per average restaurant, that's few years of work before ROI.
McDonalds's Corp, the landlord, is in a better position but they also don't want to see stores fail, it's bad for their image.
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.
As for the suckˆHˆHˆHˆHinvestors, they had a bad day.
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
(Car wash usage doesn't go down even during a recession, apparently).
Where I live, summer rain doesn't really clean the car (if that's what you care about), and in the winter you are shortening your cars life by years if you don't try and get the salt off regularly.
I bought the car. It easily lasted another 7 years before it died in a collision.
My car prior was a purely Midwest car, and I rarely washed it. It happily lasted 16 years. I passed it on to someone else, and he used it for a few more years.
I suspect the fear is overblown.
I'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 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.
But it really didn't make a difference to the longevity of the car. Sure, occasionally a repair was a tad more expensive, but that's it.
The salt from the road is driven by car tires into a briny mist that coats everything. It blocks vision through windows. It accumulates in chunks that can be kicked (like mud also can, except corrosive). It wicks its way into tiny crevices and betwixt layers and infects every part of the car that can be infected, and once there it rots everything that it can rot.
And I don't mean just the bodywork; that part has been getting better with improved processes and paint.
But stamped control arms often rust away while the ball joints and bushings are still in good form. Electrical connections rot. Frames and frame-like components often have scaly holes in them. Every exposed engine part corrodes; uncoated steel turns black, red, or brown; galvanized and aluminum parts turn white and kind of fuzzy (and stuck). Our junkyards are full of rusted-out hulks of cars with drivetrains that still work properly, even if they're ugly.
Fixing things when they break is tedious and time-consuming, and the most-sane approach to any repair on a car that's more than a few years old is to go into it with an expectation everything that doesn't crumble from rust is instead frozen with rust.
The work itself unilaterally causes a person a learn new facets of their verbal and mechanical vocabulary that they never even knew possible, and is arduous in ways that would test the emotional stamina of a Buddhist monk.
With enough cleaning and care (and just rinsing things off by driving in the rain), a car that is from the midwest can be largely saved. Getting rid of all of the salt slows the process down very dramatically.
But a car that is regularly driven in the midwestern winter is in the midst of a fairly quick process of being returned to the earth.
It's just a fact that is plain and that we live with every day. We do work to prevent it; on a warm-ish day in January, cars will line up around the block to get into a car wash and have a chance to dry out before ice freezes every orifice closed.
But it's not fear, I don't think. Just as we accept the sun coming up every day and disappearing over the opposite horizon every night, we accept the rot as something that will inevitably consume the most expensive machine that we own and that this will happen on a schedule that we play very little part in controlling.
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.
From a certain perspective, maybe some people don't care if they would be getting rid of the car in like 5 years, but if you do want to keep a car 15 years and you live in "salt country" I would strongly suggest doing something about the salt regularly.
My first car spent its first 15 years in the Midwest. No garage. Very irregular car washes (perhaps once a year when I owned it). It lasted about 20 years total. When I lived there, I didn't know anyone who had to give up a car due to rust. There definitely was rust, but not something that caused the car to break down.
Car wash is the only legal way to use soap, for better or worse.
And doing what with it, exactly?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And in your case, you use more water because you hand-wash, than you would if you used a dishwasher. You use slightly less energy because of the pump but also a lot more of your time, so... obviously how you relatively value those different things is up to you.
Our concern here, and that of many people in the area, is total water usage per household - and to a large degree water usage for washing, showers, and toilets is a small fraction of the total usage - and one that can be ignored as most people have grey water capture (as do well planned and infrastructured cities).
Water used inside the house runs out to water food, shade, animals, etc. and that use can be deducted from the water that is required for those uses.
Energy is no great cost, it comes from the sun - both as electricity via panels and directly as heat via solar hot water systems.
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 save water and electricity.
You ever park under trees?
And rarely. There is unfortunately a dirth of trees in my area since I live in a small farming town.
There are some evil trees that will make your car sticky after rain if you have to park under them, for example.
My (late) kid brother did that for a number of years. Big time sink and PITA.
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.
Started at $87/month for a 5x10 unit. Plenty of space, and I added a six-foot-tall shelving unit ($50 from Home Depot) to keep it organized and access stuff when needed.
We’ve had it for maybe 18 months now, and I just realized it’s $204/month for the last 6 months.
It’s at the top of my list to eliminate this storage unit within the next few months.
We also had a 12 month personal limit on how long we’d keep it, but life happens.
I'm convinced they do this because the kids using student loans aren't paying attention.
Read that again.
Wendover productions has a great video on the phenomena of self-storage and the economics around this: https://youtu.be/uEVv8SOJ6Is
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.
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.
Where I live in Norway the recycling station is open three days a week and I can take stuff there free as often as I like up to 2 000 kg of stuff per year.
It has never occurred to me that there would be a limit on the number of visits. Or have I misunderstood?
Clearly this is madness, but it does make it a lot easier to throw shit out than put it in a storage unit.
It's like these people can't think two steps ahead (I'd go so far as to say that's the defining feature of regulatory policy in this state). You just gave people a financial incentive to litter and dump.
Most of the US East coast has no such excuse.
Are you serious? Here in NH it's either once or twice a year. I call it "The real Father's Day" and plan to have a couple of podcasts or similar queued up for the wait in line.
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).
Making hazardous waste disposal inconvenient seems like a good way to have it end up in the normal waste stream.
https://affald.kk.dk/affaldsfraktion/saadan-sorterer-du-farl...
This is exactly what often happens
In theory, there is also an annual wait limit to free dumps, but they can't actually enforce it.
When I've had storage units and spent time there, and saw open doors and what people had in theirs, I stand by my take.
The whole point of the article posted above was that it's a bit weird how numerous and prevalent self-storage has gotten in the US.
Aka, trash by proxy.
Best to look up what people actually need. There is a lot of this junk we collect that just gets junked by the donation groups turning into a cost center.
If you move often enough within a small radius, you will highly value your storage unit. It's not necessarily just a place for junk. Many people rotate their things when their apartment lease is up or even seasonally. If you live near water, you might even store a boat. Many facilities also offer RV storage. Personally, when I had roommates I would keep my most important stuff in there instead of at home.
The attacks against storage units are engagement bait for nerds about a non-story.
It happened with crypto and it happened with AI. Now that we're back to the usual boring topics it's happening to the most random trivia.
Basically any opinion from the top 100 youtubers will be parroted here on HN. In the past few years, it's been a whole lot of urban planning stuff because of the changes in the real estate market.
If your family is seriously considering moving to a bigger house, and that move is going to cost you $20,000 that makes renting a storage unit for $1000/year sound like a great deal.
Obviously true. If one had a house with space for posessions, there would be no need for storage. As houses become ever smaller (for a given $/sqft) external self-storage becomes the only affordable way to gain some space.
My parents were poor but back ~70 years ago it was still achievable for a lower income family to buy a house with some space. As an engineer in Silicon Valley, the largest house I can afford is barely twice the square footage of my childhood bedroom. In such a tiny house we fit 3 people, all with hobbies and equipment, child has toys, etc. A house with enough space would be another million at the very least. So that's impossible.
So compared to that, a couple hundred a month for self-storage is a bargain. I hate it, would rather have the equity in a larger property but it is impossible to afford.
So yes, that's why storage facilities have such a boom. Housing by $/sqft is impossibly expensive.
Dealing with renting a storage unit vs deciding to throw away your Pokemon cards feels like kind of a wash.
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.
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 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.
Your standard also doesn't make much sense. Garages can vary from barely being able to fit a compact car to having like a four car garage with a workspace area. You're saying that for both instances that's just perfectly the right amount of storage space for those people? The person with the small garage just isn't supposed to have any of the same hobbies as the person with the giant garage?
I guess I could just get rid of all these tools though. Every time I need something fixed I'll just not do it myself and just pay others instead of just doing things myself. I guess I could also just give up on a ton of hobbies we have. We can just throw away our family traditions that have been passed down for over a hundred years. I'm not wealthy enough to live in a house with enough storage space with the other constraints about where I'd like to live, so I guess I just don't get to have these hobbies and traditions and heirlooms.
Or I can just spend like $500/yr and still manage to keep all these hobbies and traditions and heirlooms.
I don't have space issues because I do get rid of stuff and I don't buy much stuff but I still have a bunch of stuff I would throw away or sell before renting a storage.
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).
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.
Like you shove your winter PPE, your emergency stash of spare parts for process equipment, etc, etc, in some self storage lockers and get the same job done using less square footage with extensive compliance burden (or get more job done using same square footage).
Go to one of theses facilities at 7 am, and you will almost always see a few contractors packing the truck with whatever they need for the day.
Well I haven't died yet, so I suppose the time is right.
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...
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.
A bunch of foam pool noodles, a blanket and plastic wrapping tape can very quickly and cheaply get you a padded container that is easy to add handles to.
We shipped boards all over the country in the back of semi trucks with this setup and it worked great.
Just ended up moving out of the city, got around 50 acres and now my wife can’t get me out of the workshop and I’ve worked out every morning for the last 4-5 years. Shared facilities just aren’t for me.
I also have all of the family antique furniture, some of which goes back three or more generations. I have no heirs and no idea what I'll do with it all, but I don't want to leave it for my executor to deal with. At least it's in the house and not in an expensive storage unit.
you're rounding out a 26 year military career and looking at retirement but are going to do one more 2-year stint in Norfolk/Missouri/Georgia/whatever and don't feel like selling your house -- storage unit
you work for a junior house rep who may not make it through the next election cycle, and since youre a staffer you can't afford anything larger than a shoebox, but still need to bring your stuff, some of which you can't fit -- storage unit
etc. etc.
There’s lots of military folks around here so maybe people are more likely around here to store stuff for a few years if they get deployed somewhere else and plan to move the family back after? I dunno.
I’ve used self-storage twice in my life: once in college over the summer before moving into a new apartment the next school year and once when we had our first child about a year before moving to a new city and larger house, which let us make room for baby stuff while keeping things we’d use when we had more space.
tl;dw - As far as businesses go, they require low capital to construct, have low operational costs, and also operate as a way to hold real estate/land while also generating revenue.
The people that use them are usually dealing with some life event such as moving, a death in the family, divorce, and just want some solution to house possessions.
The 4 Ds of self storage: Death, divorce, dislocation, downsizing
This is AI slop.
"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.
Buddy let me tell you about 99% of human existence.
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.
Consumerism is a disease, and the USA is super good at it.
It's maddening!
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
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.
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.
My stuff all got wet from condensation and I threw away 90% of what we had in it. Lesson learned.
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
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?
If you have anything in storage you should look at it at least once a year to decide if it is worth saving. It is okay to say that "I love this thing from Grandma even though I don't have room for it", but you need to decide it is still worth it.
Unfortunately, I am now paying for two storage units for my mother-in-law's garbage. I wish we could just hire a junk truck to haul it all out; maybe someday...
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.
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.