<story><title>How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry</title><url>https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/27/17168088/cheap-storage-warehouse-self-storage-real-estate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chasingthewind</author><text>I try to be pretty slow to criticize people for taking advantage of a service that they find valuable. Calling things in these storage units &amp;quot;junk&amp;quot; is a moral judgement that&amp;#x27;s repeated a bit early on and then cast off to make room for the more mundane rundown of the market analysis.&lt;p&gt;In the end, there&amp;#x27;s no way to know the ratio of people getting good value out of this storage to the number of people throwing good money after bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Spooky23</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s junk if you don&amp;#x27;t know what it is. My sister&amp;#x27;s mother-in-law spends about $1000&amp;#x2F;mo on storage units in 6 cities. They were a military family and moved frequently.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that they don&amp;#x27;t remember what is in the storage units, and the cost of traveling across the country to go through a closet is steep and of questionable value. So she is stuck in a cycle of paying for things that she may or may not need. My understanding is that many people are in similar circumstances.</text></comment>
<story><title>How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry</title><url>https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/27/17168088/cheap-storage-warehouse-self-storage-real-estate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chasingthewind</author><text>I try to be pretty slow to criticize people for taking advantage of a service that they find valuable. Calling things in these storage units &amp;quot;junk&amp;quot; is a moral judgement that&amp;#x27;s repeated a bit early on and then cast off to make room for the more mundane rundown of the market analysis.&lt;p&gt;In the end, there&amp;#x27;s no way to know the ratio of people getting good value out of this storage to the number of people throwing good money after bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patentatt</author><text>Sure, what if the rent&amp;#x2F;mortgage you pay per square foot in your home is greater than the rent for a storage locker down the road? And there are reasonable use cases for medium-long term storage, such as seasonal items. I don&amp;#x27;t know how many people use them this way, but I can see reasonable uses too.</text></comment>