Self-Storage in the Land of Plenty | Post 14 | Pennsylvania

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Across the USA

4 min readAug 17, 2016

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I don’t know if these observations are related, reinforcing, in tension, or what, but here are three of the most striking and repetitive features of the American landscape from my cross-country Street View trip to date:

There is a lot of space in this country.
There are a lot of empty or abandoned buildings.
There are lots of self-storage facilities.

The first observation should not be construed as grim recognition of the miles and pixels of Street View images remaining till the West Coast. It merely reflects the fact that almost 75 percent of the United States is rural. (Only 15 percent of the population lives across that spread.) It’s true my route has largely steered clear of major urban conglomerations, but I’ve been traveling in the dense Northeast, not the wide open West, and I routinely pass through small cities like Utica and major college towns like Ithaca. Still, I regularly gaze across horizon-reaching fields and acres of mowed lawns. The farms and homes I saw on this recent stretch crossing the New York-Pennsylvania border are mimically typical of the Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont countrysides I traveled.

As I continue West, I’ll undoubtedly be moving through even greater expanses of space — and encountering more vacant buildings. As I’ve noted in a previous post, very few miles pass without a glimpse of shuttered storefronts, unoccupied, collapsing houses, or other abandoned property. The reasons for this are likely complex — foreclosure and other housing crises, urbanization and suburbanization, poverty and inequality — but I have no reason to doubt Census estimates that over 18 million homes in the U.S. are vacant. America may be beautiful, but it’s also littered with neglect — obviously so from Street View.

In short, open land and unoccupied structures are abundant in America. And yet, judging by the number of self-storage units I’ve seen, Americans are desperate for space. I saw three facilities in Mansfield, Pennsylvania, alone.

And a shed shop in neighboring Wellsboro.

The Mansfield self-storage facilities represent just a fraction of the 2.5 billion square feet of rentable self-storage space in the U.S. Taken together, the industry supplies 21 square feet of offsite space per American household. This means, boasts the Self Storage Association, that “it is physically possible that every American could stand — all at the same time — under the total canopy of self storage roofing.”

So my Street View eyes have not deceived me. Relatively new to the American landscape, self storage is booming. Wikipedia asserts that public storage facilities existed in “ancient China,” but that Lauderdale Storage in Florida — opened in 1958 — was the first storage establishment as we know them today. Texans were the early adopters, in the 1960s, with the real proliferation not coming till the early 2000s.

In a sentence custom-built for Street View journaling, Tom Vanderbilt explained in Slate, “For a resolutely banal landscape feature, self storage is a surprisingly fertile cultural indicator.” Writing in 2005, Vanderbilt cited an assortment of reasons for the explosion of self-storage facilities, from eBay sellers’ warehousing needs, to consumerism, to architectural shifts away from attics and basements (think bungalows, ranches, and trusses instead of rafters in roofing). The industry likes to think of itself as “recession-resistant” since its product tends to serve the ever-present “four Ds” of death, divorce, downsizing, and dislocation.

There may be land and houses to spare in the U.S., but stocks are up at the large self-storage chains and occupancy rates reach 90 percent — thanks in part to a Rwanda-based ex-pat with possessions in a 10’x10’ Washington, D.C., CubeSmart unit.

Ground covered since last post:

Start: Ithaca, N.Y.
Cayuta, N.Y.
Elmira, N.Y.
Millerton, Pa.
Mansfield, Pa.
End: Wellsboro, Pa.

Self-Storage in the Land of Plenty | Post 14 | Pennsylvania

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Written by Matthew Muspratt