‘In London there is no space at all’: the rise of self-storage as rents soar
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I think most people just use storage facilities to store junk they don't want to throw away, which is a different thing, and often unrelated to the size of your home.
Some people just expand to fill all available space. Most of my neighbors park their cars on the street, despite having two-car garages, and 2000 square foot houses. Their garages are full of boxes, to the point where you can see them leaning up against the frosted glass windows. My grandparents bought the house next door to the one they'd already filled with junk, and filled that one with junk too. I don't think it's necessarily the cost of rent or the size of apartments that proliferates self-storage facilities, I think acquiring junk and being afraid to get rid of it is a different (perhaps especially modern) problem that would exist regardless.
We got rid of a lot of junk.
After a few months we had sold the property and then looked at the stuff we had put in storage and 95% of it was junk....
Yeah. 8 years of storage for what's now a bunch of kids toys, 120v tools, and some random furniture that we're never going to ship, some handmade stuff.
Anyway, we're going to have an epic yard-sale this year when we actually make it back.
Which you'll probably find is more trouble than it's worth but at least it will get stuff out of your hands. Going to make a serious effort to get rid of a fair bit of stuff this summer myself.
Otherwise, the tools, books and toys will go to the local thrift stores. And the crap goes to the dump.
I remember reading an article once that said exactly the same thing. The economics of it just don't add up for most people. Anything over 6 months to 12 months and you're generally better off selling or even giving cheap stuff away and then repurchasing later if you need to. Storage gets expensive pretty fast. The guy working at the storage centre said most weeks he'd either end up emptying an abandoned unit or see someone removing most of their stuff and throwing it into a skip.
The most valuable things I own as a homeowner are my collection of tools for home improvement, but even their value pales in comparison to the value of the property itself. I'm very glad I don't have a hoarder mentality.
Yeah. There are a lot of people who use storage units (or attics or garages) to store stuff that they have no real plan to ever use. And, at some point, it gets sufficiently out of control that dealing with it becomes such a big project that it's easier to close the door and forget about it.
I do use my attic as something of a staging area for moving things out of the house (as well as for bulky stuff I do use but not frequently). But I try to be deliberate about winnowing things down over time.
I've been seeing more and more of this in my area. Big houses, massive empty driveways, cars parked on the road. Slows the traffic down and causes jams everywhere. Infuriating.
where/how many outlets? is there a giant vertical beam in the middle or something? horizontal beam for hoisting/hanging things? is it insulated? finished? rafter space? flooring? cabinets? suitable for a mini split AC? what kind of water heater are we talking about? vent holes near the eaves? is the electrical panel a dangerous antique? so many questions...
i guess not many people agree with me. luckily i can still just use my parents garage when i want to do some project work, but that's still 30 minutes away. and interest rates are probably not coming down any time soon, so oh well.
The current situation shows that there are caveats to this strategy.
For example, rates are high, but prices are still lagging (they will drop eventually, when people begin to realize no one wants to buy their overpriced house with a 7% rate)
Also, rates could stay high longer than the average person stays in a house.
Garages tend to be the box storage location for things that aren't used for staging, which is probably why they aren't in photos.
Matterport offers 3d virtual tours which I've found to be awesome when searching for property. More than once it saved us driving across town because it was easy to tell the layout wasn't what we'd want. One regional For Sale by Owner group has the 3d tour as part of their basic package, which always made me lean towards viewing those when looking online, though I've never seen a garage.
Maybe 15% from listing photos that are often taken with a lens that makes rooms look bigger than they are.
Maybe there's a road that you have not explored. Or maybe even just getting a better car.
Read books and magazines from the early 20th century and before and everyone from starving artists and authors up to nobility and royals lived there. Now it's all either offices or empty units.
There's no sense of resident life there now: people might "go out" to central London for a day or night out or they might work there, but they'll travel home for maybe an hour afterwards.
The Douglas Adams of this century certainly won't live in Islington: the house he once shared with two others is now worth something like £2 million (to say nothing of the 5-bed he moved to in the 80s).
If you're talking about the actual City of London then maybe, but most other places I have found quite lively and active in the evenings, especially around where I live.
And yet if you search for it on the Internet Archive, look how many different people used to live there, and they're just the ones that got their address written down durably: https://archive.org/search?query=craven+Street&sin=TXT&sort=... There are 22,000 results!¹
From a quick scan, we have architects, doctors, people dying aged 74, births, remarriage of a widow of a naval captain, soap-boiler, a tailor, a church donors, lords, ladies, "misses" and esquires.
The same chart has the population as 1,911,728 in 2020, about 10% smaller than a century ago. It's now the capital of a country with only about 9 million people.
My main point though was that Vienna's population decreased greatly after its empire, and while increasing is still 10% smaller than a century ago.
London's population has different dynamics, and I can't pretend to have a good reason. I can observe that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London shows a clear decline correlating with its shift away from being an imperial power, from ~8 million in 1951 to ~6.6M 1981.
To another comment, I'd expect the City of London (i.e. the financial district) to be pretty deserted at night as very few people actually live there.
The thing is, for hundreds of years, it was indeed residential. Those were houses, built to live in.
Almost every major street in the center had office space available to rent and if you take a walk through some of the newer "residential" developments south of the river in Vauxhall and the Albert Embankment at the weekend the silence is eerie.
Maybe that house is now being let by Islington estate agents Hotblack Desiato. That would be neat.
“I had a really difficult customer who was quite rude and arrogant, never paid on time and always gave me a hard time,” he said. “And then he just stopped responding at all.”
After a couple of months not paying rent Prince cut the customer’s lock off and found the unit empty. The customer had removed all his possessions, but “in the middle of the room was a 4ft inflatable penis”.
“I think I knew what he was saying to me,” said Prince
This is peak Snowcrash.
Could you elaborate? I’m interested to understand by what you mean.
It is presented as a normal way of life for people who are struggling to make ends meet.
> But there are worse places to live. There are much worse places right here in this U-Stor-It. Only the big units like this one have their own doors. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. These are slum housing, 5-by-10s and 10-by-10s where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets.
Not the illegal cigarettes!
Article describes a weird mix of sad (people living in storage rooms) to extremely normal usage (people using it to store bulky items that are used only on occasion like bikes).
Let Northern investment be more than polticial virtue signalling
The only way they'll get that sort of population expansion is if they enact very liberal immigration policies, which is not something most nations in Europe are signaling they're willing to do (quite the opposite so far).
That's enough to make the UK ~40% immigrant in one lifetime (80 years). Given how rare it is for countries to change so significantly so fast, it's fair to say that they already have very liberal immigration. The UK population rose from 63 million in 2011, to 68 million in 2023, despite a below-replacement fertility rate of 1.74 [1].
While it's true that most nations in Europe want lower immigration [2,3,4], such sentiments rarely translate into policy, similar to the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom
[2] Europeans overwhelmingly against immigration: Poll (2011) - https://www.euractiv.com/section/social-europe-jobs/news/eur...
[3] Europeans Most Negative Toward Immigration (2015) - https://news.gallup.com/poll/186209/europeans-negative-towar...
[4] Poll reveals great unease among Europeans about migration policy (2022) - https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2022/02/01/poll-reveals-great-...
I get that this has been talked to death, but it still kind of boils to a simple fact: We live in an actual, physical world. We can't build more than e.g. one apartment in the same physical space.
I would think programmers could understand the concept of 3d collision detection.
I would think programmers could understand the concept of allocating resources more efficiently.
I would think programmers could understand that brute force resource allocations have very real consequences for the feel and behavior of a city along with hard to predict consequences.