This report in today’s New York Times on us Americans and our storage space doesn’t prove anything — but it does offer yet more evidence that ordinary Americans in fact are much wealthier today than we were just a few years ago. Here’s the gist:
According to Michael T. Scanlon Jr., president of the Self Storage Association, a trade group, 11 million American households currently rent storage space, an increase of 90 percent since 1995 — even as the size of new American houses has grown and the size of the American family has shrunk.
In the last two years, close to a million more households have joined the ranks of storage renters, and there is now more than two billion square feet of rental storage space in the United States, earning more than $22 billion in gross revenue in 2006.
