Why do Americans have seven feet?

How the UK storage industry is dwarfed by its US counterpart

At first glance,  British self storage seems an impressive beast, at least if its vital statistics are anything to go by: 750 facilities nationwide that serve 235,000 customers, generating revenues to the tune of £360 million a year. Yet this is nothing compared to the scale of business done across the Atlantic, where industry revenues generate more money than Hollywood and 1 in every 11 households is a customer.

The most extraordinary statistic of them all, however, is that if – following some apocalyptic event which destroyed the entire housing stock in both countries whilst every storage unit miraculously remained standing – the two countries’ populations were forced to live inside these structures, each Briton would get 0.44 square feet (the size of a small window box) whilst every American could have more than 7. In short, it would possible for every citizen of the USA to stand inside a storage unit at the same time whilst they all enjoy relative comfort, something that could happen in no other large country in the world.

Swelling houses, shrinking families

What makes this all the more remarkable is that in the period of greatest expansion by the industry, 1973–2004, the average American house became 740 square feet larger whilst at the same time people started having fewer babies. Thus, the amount of extra space required by each American must have increased exponentially to support its growth.

Several factors are put forward to explain this phenomenon. Firstly, Americans are an extremely mobile people, for whom the average is to move house eleven times during a life. This generates a lot of business from them storing possessions while living between addresses. Building on this fact, the great migration in America throughout the last 25 years has been towards the so-called ‘Sunbelt’ of Southern states that enjoy warm weather. Houses in these areas are less likely to have either attics or basements than those in the cooler North-East, so storage is often used to hold the overflow in personal goods that occurs when someone moves between them. Building technology is thought to have played its part too, through the increased use of trusses at the expense of wooden beams. These represent a more economical way for builders to support the roofs on new houses, but have the downside of taking up far more space and so depriving many modern houses of loft storage.

Relentless Consumption

However, what ultimately underpins this business is the relentless nature of American consumption, which not only kept the wheels of international capitalism turning until the current recession, but also made a profitable sector out of supplying extra space for people to keep their purchases in once housing storage had been exhausted. The average American, who owns 25 consumer electronics products (and, more worryingly, 1.7 guns) simply doesn’t have enough spare room for all the consumer purchases he or she makes, and so renting some more has become the way of choice to house them all because it turns the need to do so into a form of shopping itself.

It is perhaps this association with the more consumerist aspects of American culture which has precipitated the subtle media backlash against the storage industry. Negative depictions have appeared in several media channels in recent years, such as the film Monster showing a serial killer who lives inside a storage unit, and a CSI episode being centred on a backstreet surgeon who uses one to perform her grisly sex-change operations. Whilst depicting it negatively, these uses show the extent to which self storage’s ubiquity in the United States has made it a target for popular culture, as has the way it’s made headlines in real life through the unintended uses some customers put it to: both Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef stored chemicals in rented units, and every year a few literal skeletons are found hanging inside some as part of murder investigations. It will be interesting to see if the UK’s consumer culture ever develops enough to give storage the same cultural impact over here, or if there is something peculiarly American about the instinct to constantly buy more space for housing your surplus purchases in.