The news cycle periodically turns up tales of tenants taking up residence in their self-storage units. Local outlets sometimes treat these stories as a form of light-weight novelty coverage or even as a way to laugh at or trivialize homelessness. It is always illegal to live in your storage unit, and we absolutely do not advocate breaking the law — that is clear. But the idea of people living in their storage units paints a picture of current cultural trends. Is it entitlement and just people trying to save a buck in the name of minimalism? Or is it a larger problem?
Storage industry publications, meanwhile, have done fairly serious reporting on the topic and generally take a compassionate stance, reporting the anti-bias talking points of their interviewees who work in social services. The unhoused are not always or even usually unemployed, addicted, and/or irresponsible, as popular vitriol and right-wing propaganda outlets like Seattle’s KOMO 5 News often portray them. Rather, folks fall into homelessness due to medical bills, divorce, and the chronic failure of wages to keep up with QE-inflated housing prices. While serious reporting on the intersection of storage and the housing crisis is certainly welcome, less weighty forums like YouTube comment threads can be equally informative.
In 2017, a man who’d given up his apartment to hike the Pacific Crest Trail made something of a name for himself on YouTube by moving into his storage unit for two months. “007craft” already had a sizeable following, gleaned from his video game broadcasts dating back to the infancy of YouTube in 2006. But his storage-dwelling video is far and away his biggest viral hit, with over 8.5 million views as of this writing. Something about this story has struck a nerve. YouTube comment threads tend to be sociological barometers (often being frightening reads), and viewers of “Storage Living in Style” have a lot to say. Drawing out implications of their pithy responses, we can discern several themes that shed light on the appeal of a bizarre, don’t-try-this-at-home story.
The Sincere and the Sob Stories
One theme in the comments is admiration for 007craft’s, well, craftiness. His can-do attitude appears to be almost pitifully inspiring for those in cities hit particularly hard by the flood of speculative capital that’s pushed median home prices into the millions:
“we all bow down to you man.. you are [expletive] crafty. I’m in Vancouver and i’m so desperate to find a way around this ridiculous rent sistuation [sic], being low income. I wanted to do the car thing and i still will… save for a camper eventually, but knowing this is possible if you are super crafty is inspiring.”
Maybe storage-dwellers are the latest to tap into the tragic heroism of the American dream of self-reliant homesteading?
The comments also contain a surprising number of pained, heartfelt stories of homelessness, including several with sincere religious overtones: “You are such a smart young man, you are very creative. I’m happy you now got your new apartment. May The Most High richly bless you in your future plans Peace.” One lengthy comment plaintively asks 007craft to pray for the commenter.
The Snarky Precarians
For every “inspired” or prayerful commenter, however, there are several snarky ones. Some of these are vitriolic, in the usual YouTube troll style, but several are darkly funny in a way that expresses a muted solidarity: “Well I think the YouTube algorithm knows where my life is headed” is representative of this category. Many more are overtly polemical, railing against the high cost of living and “[t]he [expletive] us poor ppl [sic] go thru [sic].” One opines that “[r]ent in many places is practically robbery.” While 007craft also mentions the high cost of living, he doesn’t seem incensed about it. And while he may be an iconic housing-crisis victim to some, others find him too privileged, racially or otherwise, to play this part: “Dude isn’t from the struggle… He’s a privileged boy that had the time and resources to do this for views,” as one commenter has it.
The Speculative Spectators
The spectacular nature of 007’s viral performance of precarity and resourcefulness spawns a healthy number of meta-textual comments. Forty mention the reality series “Storage Wars,” itself the topic of much speculation about scriptedness, while over 50 comments use the word “fake,” and many more impugn the veracity of the tale (“This guy probably owns the building lol or his parents do….muhaha”). Some even claim to have seen 007craft admitting to an agreement with the facility. That’s not enough to dampen the enthusiasm of at least one poster, who can’t shake the idea of the storage-dweller as a “smart” risk-taker: “[T]hey said in a faq he answered the unit owners let him. So yeah they knew. Still wtf. Smart tho [sic] risky and uncomfortable very smart what he did.” Still others tell their own stories of living in storage units and point out a number of items they believe would have gotten 007craft caught.
Eighteen comments refer to the unit’s 4K TV, all repeating versions of the anti-poor trope and chastising the storage-dweller for having backward priorities or not really being too poor to get an apartment. (For the record, while this particular fellow is on the privileged end of the homeless population, a 4K TV averaged around $1,000 in 2017, certainly not enough to cover first-last-deposit move-in costs, since 007craft mentions that “an apartment in the area was $1,000+ a month.”
Storage-Dwelling: A Big Problem?
Whatever your view of him, 007craft is clearly not very representative of those who, by choice or ill chance, end up living in their storage units. Available data trying to ascertain the scope of storage-dwelling is patchy at best, but many sources try to use data-driven and a human-interest approach to push back against anti-homeless stigmas. If you become aware of a storage unit dweller, see below.
“Never approach anyone living in a unit by yourself. You should always call for the police … to assist you in evicting … While it’s not a universal truth, many times people who are living in a storage unit are doing so to avoid police. They may be under the influence of drugs or alcohol or hiding illegal activity, and they could become aggressive or violent when asked to leave or vacate the property.”
Operators and police officers who assume you’re a drug-addled transient are probably not the only reason to skip crashing in your unit. It should be abundantly clear that 007craft’s ingenuity is a gimmick, not a viable solution to the very real housing crisis so many of us face.
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