During the summer of 2019, not long before COVID shut the country down, I spent three and a half days driving from Connecticut, where I live, to Kansas City, where I grew up, and three and a half days driving back. My routes in both directions were lazy and circuitous, and they included not even one mile of interstate highway. I ate roast turkey with all the trimmings at a restaurant in upstate New York that offers Thanksgiving dinner every day of the year; stood at the northern end of a puddle representing the Dead Sea in a grassy park created, a century and a half ago, as a walk-over relief map of the Holy Land; saw surprisingly many sex-toy superstores near billboards promoting belief in Jesus Christ; and visited the birthplace of the Western novelist Zane Grey, who, it turns out, was also a minor-league baseball player and a practicing dentist, and whose real first name was Pearl. Mainly, though, I spent long hours alone in my car thinking about our remarkable country. By the time I got home, I had concluded, based on a multitude of examples, that the two great pillars of American culture are church and self-storage.

A self-storage facility is a business that rents lockable space to people who own more stuff than they know what to do with. (A 2022 survey by the Craftsman tool division of Stanley Black & Decker found that more than a third of the country’s residential garages were so full of overflow possessions that their owners were unable to park cars in them.) “The history of self-storage probably goes back a long way, but the seventies is when it really got started, mostly with mom-and-pop-type operations,” Patrick Lemp, an appraiser and broker who focusses on the industry, told me. “Later, it became an accepted institutional-quality asset class.”

The United States is the world leader, with roughly ninety per cent of global capacity. Texas, of the fifty states, has the most facilities, Hawaii the fewest. Among cities, New York ranks third, after Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, although on a per-capita basis many smaller municipalities are comparably served. Reno, Nevada, is home to a number of operations that pick up, store, and redeliver tents, chairs, bicycles, and other gear for repeat Burning Man attendees, and Wichita, Kansas, was once named the Self-Storage Capital of the U.S. Units range from closet-size to cavernous, including spaces that are large enough to hold entire houses. Most of the facilities I saw on my road trip were single-story structures with lots of closely spaced roll-up metal doors; some, owned or operated by national chains such as Public Storage, Extra Space Storage, and CubeSmart, looked like office buildings. According to the co-founder and C.E.O. of Neighbor, an industry marketplace that works like Airbnb, there are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined. Annual revenues are estimated to be more than forty billion dollars.

People who work in self-storage often say that their market is driven by “the four D’s”: death, displacement, divorce, and downsizing, all life events that entail sudden collisions between stuff accumulation and reality. Years ago, Paul Roossin, an A.I. technologist and former neuroscientist, moved from a house in the suburbs to an apartment in Manhattan, and, because he thought he might want to move back to the suburbs someday, he rented a twenty-by-forty-foot storage space in Queens, for things that he no longer had room for. The facility was accessible by subway, and he visited from time to time. “Literally, though, years would pass,” he told me. Among the items he stored were a synthesizer, a piano, and a Hammond organ. At some point, he donated all three to a nonprofit, and once they were no longer blocking his view of the interior of his unit he was reminded of possessions that he had forgotten he owned. He later downsized from his downsizing, over a period of months, with help from a friend.