How and What We Store

From the New York Times magazine, The Self-Storage Self

The Self Storage Association notes that, with more than seven square feet for every man, woman and child, it’s now “physically possible that every American could stand — all at the same time — under the total canopy of self-storage roofing.”
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The first modern self-storage facilities opened in the 1960s, and for two decades storage remained a low-profile industry, helping people muddle through what it terms “life events.” For the most part, storage units were meant to temporarily absorb the possessions of those in transition: moving, marrying or divorcing, or dealing with a death in the family. And the late 20th century turned out to be a golden age of life events in America, with peaking divorce rates and a rush of second- and third-home buying. At the same time, the first baby boomers were left to face down the caches of heirlooms and clutter in their parents’ basements.
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It raises a simple question: where was all that stuff before?
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“A lot of it just comes down to the great American propensity toward accumulating stuff,”
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Fifty percent of renters were now simply storing what wouldn’t fit in their homes — even though the size of the average American house had almost doubled in the previous 50 years, to 2,300 square feet.

Not only do we have too much stuff, some of us are hoarders, afraid to throw anything away.

Probably, the most famous hoarders of all were the Collyer brothers, Columbia College graduate both, who were found dead in their Harlem brownstone, surrounded by more than 100 tons of stuff and rubbish they had collected over decades.  The fear of throwing anything away is sometimes called 'Collyer brothers syndrome'.  I wonder how many such people now use self-storage as a way of being able to save everything they have ever owned and not be buried by it.