They give examples of people needing space to make furniture, or fixing motorcycles in their storage units. Things which you can't feasibly pull off in a studio apartment. That makes sense, and I'm glad there is a solution for activities like that.
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.
When we recently looked into self-storage to store our junk, the high prices per cubic foot (in a very HCOL area) made us recontextualize our junk in terms of how much rent each item was paying to live with us. Far more in rent over a few months then just buying a new one of whatever it was, when we needed it.
> Far more in rent over a few months then just buying a new one of whatever it was, when we needed it.
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.
My wife uses the local thrift shops as "storage" for a very large fraction of our household goods. The shop will send someone to pick up our donations for storage for free. When we "take stuff out of storage", it isn't quite what we put in, but usually close enough and a nice change of pace. And the storage fee is very modest.
8 years ago, we moved continents. Some stuff got shipped, some stuff stored that was too precious to sell but not precious enough to ship.
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.
When we left, the community had a pretty good yard-sale culture. We won't make back anything like what we paid for the stuff or the storage, but we'll not have to deal with the storage costs any more.
Otherwise, the tools, books and toys will go to the local thrift stores. And the crap goes to the dump.
To the degree that people get a storage unit to store things that they don't really have a future plan for using/displaying/etc., they should probably reconsider. It's mostly paying money to kick the can down the road and even potentially make it someone else's problem.
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.
i noticed that real estate listings for residential SFH's in my area almost never show pictures of the garage. which is weird, because that's basically there's only two reasons i'd want to buy a suburban house - for work space in the garage, and the backyard. everything else can be redone pretty easily. maybe not cheaply, but pretty easily. you can't really make new land or add a 2-3 car garage for 25 grand.
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.
It’s generally better to buy when interest rates are high than to wait for them to drop because home prices are generally based on affordability. You refinance when interest rates drop and actually save money, but your stuck paying a giant low interest loan with little recourse.
> It’s generally better to buy when interest rates are high than to wait for them to drop
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.
Prices near me have dropped quite a bit especially if you include inflation in your comparisons. Though home prices are very local and your income isn’t guaranteed to keep up with inflation.
Real estate photos are notoriously awful for understanding relative size and layout of everything. I do wonder if that's intentional so you reach out to a Realtor® to view the property?
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.
My house hunting wasn't quite pre-Web but it was before Google Streetview/Google Maps/etc. so it was pretty just the listing service printout and you hit deal-breakers a significant majority of the time pretty quickly as soon as you drove there.
FWIW, I bet a lot of times the garage is packed with moving boxes and furniture, and that's why they don't include photos of it in the listing. If you don't time everything just right, you can have an empty, staged house but not have anywhere to put your stuff before the moving van shows up. I didn't take any pictures of my last house's garage, because the realtor was so aggressive about scheduling the photos that there just wasn't time to get on a moving company's calendar.
I think in your case I would invest in optimizing how you get to your parent's house. Maybe working from a place nearby, if you can work remotely. Or moving to a different apartment which has good connection via train.
Maybe there's a road that you have not explored. Or maybe even just getting a better car.
>Some people just expand to fill all available space.
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.
> Most of my neighbors park their cars on the street, despite having two-car garages, and 2000 square foot houses.
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.
I think this is more of an underaddressed mental health issue [compulsive hoarding]. I definitely don't think it's a modern problem in that people definitely had compulsive hoarding issues in the past, but people were generally too poor/impoverished to be able to afford to keep much (so keeping everything you can compulsively is arguably rational behavior).
And yet if you walk in the centre in the evening, large areas are completely dead and empty.
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).
Really? That is very different from my experience.
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.
Take a random "residential" street from Google maps, Craven Street, near Charing Cross. Hardly a hive of human life: walk down there at night and I'd guess maybe 1 in 8 or 10 windows may have lights on.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/bbT6JnPH8X2NN9ht9
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.
I usually stay about a block from there. It's not deserted at night but it's also not really a residential neighborhood and there is a lot more action as you walk up towards Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, and all the West End theatres.
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 same applies to the city of Vienna proper compared to what it used to be a century ago. A lot more densely populated, a lot more life into it, nowadays, if you ignore the touristic downtown, the city might as well be a dormitory after 6 or 7 in the evening.
Isn't that an extreme case? A little over a century ago it was the capital ~50 million people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a city population of 2,239,000 in 1916 (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna ).
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.
You could make a similar case about London, too, it has lost a lot of its mojo compared to the 2000s. The Great Financial Crisis has put a knife through its financial heart, and Brexit certainly didn't help. This recent [1] Economist article about the LSE showcases some of that gloom.
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.
The City of London (aka the financial district). I'm not sure if I'd consider that the "centre" of London or not. I guess it would depend on the context.
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.
“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 my home,” she said, indicating the yellow door of her storage unit. “It’s an important place for me. I know people who sleep on buses and keep their clothes here. That’s happening here in this country.”
> Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl, roommates, are chilling out in their home, a spacious 20-by-30 in a U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. The room has a concrete slab floor, corrugated steel walls separating it from the neighboring units, and—this is a mark of distinction and luxury—a roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few red rays at times like this, when the sun is setting over LAX. From time to time, a 777 or a Sukhoi/Kawasaki Hypersonic Transport will taxi in front of the sun and block the sunset with its rudder, or just mangle the red light with its jet exhaust, braiding the parallel rays into a dappled pattern on the wall.
> 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.
>people storing illegal cigarettes. There is almost no limit to what people use them for – from every walk of society
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).
I'm sure that continuing to grow the population at an unsustainable rate will solve this. Need those new consumers to make the line on the graph go up, no matter the consequences.
Europe, including the UK, is facing a population decline over the coming decades, not unsustainable population growth.
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).
The estimated UK population is clearly growing; net migration has been in the positive hundreds of thousands nearly every year since 1998, even exceeding 500,000 in 2022. Why would this trend not only stop, but reverse for long enough to cause a significant population decline?
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.
The woman in the article is a live-in domestic worker, her place of employment is very specific and has to be nearby. I think this type of employment only exists in London.
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.
The end-game is a Hong Kong-like residential architecture, then?
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.
It's often easier to build more housing in London, with a younger population that rents and lives in London _for_ the density, versus the more spacious suburbs and satellite towns with an older, homeowning demographic. Especially when you look at which parties run which councils.
Good programmers understand the whole system and don't just see "Memory" and "CPU" but instead see different caches and execution units. So a poor programmer sees "houses" and wants to find "a house" "big enough". A good programmer trades locality and latency. I can have more stuff, if I put the stuff I don't need all the time, somewhere else, at the cost of higher latency, and that means that I can live in town, closer to where the money making and social opportunities are.
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.