e.g. let's say you are starting a painting business

You have a lot of equipment you need (ladders, sprayers, buckets, etc) but you live in a small apartment.

A self storage unit can hold all of the above and the storage price is probably tax deductible.

Just get rid of your stuff when you can. Life will be better.

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".

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.

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.

Made self storage plentiful and cheap in areas where housing lot sqft was limited.

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.

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.

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.