Underwood’s facility contains a hundred and forty-five units, varying in size from twenty-five to three hundred square feet. “In the third phase, we added mostly ten-by-thirties, because people kept asking for bigger and bigger,” he told me. Most of his customers store what you’d expect: ordinary garage overflow, gently used exercise equipment, out-of-season sporting goods, and furniture made superfluous by moving, renovation, or winter. About a quarter of the customers are local contractors or business owners, who store small machinery, tools, supplies, merchandise, or paperwork that they’re legally required to hang on to. The smallest units go for about eighty dollars a month, the largest for about three hundred. The facility has a website, but if you want to learn about rates or reserve a unit you have to call or e-mail Underwood’s sole employee, who is married to a former resident state trooper and used to be the town’s treasurer. If you don’t live or work nearby, she may ask you a few questions. (An occasional issue for self-storage operators is people who rent units with no intention of paying for them, in order to get rid of stuff that would be expensive to dispose of properly.) The buildings require virtually no maintenance. “It’s as simple as I could make it,” Underwood said.
Newer self-storage facilities are often bigger, fancier, and more technologically advanced. Recently, I visited a four-year-old Extra Space location in Wildwood, Florida, an hour northwest of Orlando. It’s one of many facilities on the outskirts of the vast, golf-cart-dependent gerontopolis known as the Villages, which covers nearly sixty square miles in three counties, has some two hundred and fifty pickleball courts, offers live music and walker-friendly dancing every night of the week, and is growing as fast as the universe is expanding. People who retire to the Villages almost always come from houses where they had more space, and if they don’t off-load their surplus possessions before they move they need a place to stash them. Kerry Copeland, who oversees twenty Extra Space locations in that part of Florida, showed me around. “There are about seven hundred and fifty units here, all climate-controlled,” he said. The building is three stories tall, and customers can drive right into it by means of a ground-level tunnel. Some of the biggest units open directly onto the tunnel and are large enough to park trucks in. Copeland punched a code into a keypad, and we rode an elevator to the second floor. Motion-activated lights came on as we walked through a maze of air-conditioned aisles. Fire sprinklers were visible overhead. Every surface was pristine. Almost all the units we passed were rented.
Something I didn’t encounter during my tour with Copeland was other human beings. (People who have storage units tend to visit them about as often as they visit elderly relatives in nursing homes.) Earlier that day, I’d stopped by a competing facility, a few miles away, where I did see some renters—an older couple who had parked their pickup truck in front of a row of non-climate-controlled units. They had opened the doors of two of them, and the man, who wasn’t wearing a shirt, was talking on his phone and using his free hand to move stuff around. The woman was only intermittently visible, behind tall, jumbled piles: Christmas decorations, including an artificial tree and a toddler-size nutcracker-type figure; two big grills, one charcoal and one propane; a compound miter saw and an assortment of other large power tools; several plastic garment bags; hard-to-identify pieces of folding furniture, probably chairs. The bed of their truck contained what looked like a radio-controlled toy car, so it’s possible that they were either preparing for or recovering from a visit by grandchildren.
Many of the items that the couple had stored were of the type that people keep in basements, but the high water table in most of Florida makes basements a rarity. A useful tip I got from Copeland is that, if you expect to visit your unit reasonably often, or if you’ve hired other people to fill it for you, it makes sense to rent one that’s larger than the volume of your possessions, so that you have room to maneuver. I can confirm from experience that this is sound advice. A few years ago, my wife and her siblings moved their mother from a large one-bedroom apartment to a single room, and they rented a storage unit to hold her surplus stuff while they debated what to do next. Everything fit, barely, but removing items from the back was like working a Rubik’s Cube.