Living in a storage unit trope: does it actually happen these days?

Cafe Society
1

A lot of fiction uses the trope of a character down on es luck moving into a storage unit. But in my experience, storage contracts have strict rules prohibiting living in the unit and there are usually cameras or regular staff monitoring to catch people out. Is there evidence of this actually happening in recent years? Maybe it happened in the past when security concerns were less acute.

One storage manager told me she had recently caught a tenant bringing his mistress in to have illicit sex in the unit. They weren’t living there but still got kicked out.

2

Well how did the manger of the unit know he wasn’t just storing his mattress there and needed a “friend” to help him move it?

But yes, it seems it would be difficult to get away with living in a storage unit. For one their would be no lock on the outside, which would be a dead give away. I could see getting away with it for a couple of hours every now and then by claiming you were organizing stuff, but to do so consistently doesn’t seem feasible unless you have some sort of agreement with the people watching.

3

Lots of storage places aren’t well-monitored, and it definitely happens but I don’t know how common it is. I do know that about five years ago my girlfriend took a work friend to pick up her car from a ‘shop’ as a favor. They drove up to the gate of a storage place, she said ‘oh, we must have the wrong address’, friend said ‘no, gate code is xxxx’, and when they went in there was a guy running an auto shop from a ground-level storage unit.

I don’t think that all storage unit places are so closely monitored that they have someone who cross-references which units are rented and which aren’t, and then checks that each individual unit that is rented has a lock on it every few hours. I’m sure some do, but I don’t have the impression that intense monitoring like that is normal. And you could easily rig up fake lock to pass visual inspection if that was a problem.

4

There are cameras and every time he uses his gate code is recorded. The two of them repeatedly went in there for hours at a time. The manager couldn’t swear to exactly what they were doing in there, but didn’t need to.