A frequent use of self storage is to store one’s possessions during a vacation, so that one’s home can be rented to another vacationer. A once rare practice, renting residential homes for a vacation has become common over the last decades, as travelers try to make do on smaller budgets. Renting a home from the homeowner is often cheaper than staying in a hotel. But this summer many cities have begun to ban short-term vacation rentals, including apartment rentals and condo rentals. In other cities, longstanding laws against the short term rentals are being enforced more rigorously for the first time. New York and Chicago passed laws this summer banning short-term rentals. Maui, Hawaii, has begun to enforce an old law against short-term vacation home rentals, and so has Paris, France. [More]

Eleanor Morse, an art collector who made a museum out of a storage warehouse in 1982, died last week in St. Petersburg, Florida. She was 97 years old. Like many collectors whose collections have outgrown their own homes and living spaces, Morse, along with her late husband, A. Reynolds Morse, made their art collection, which included hundreds of modern paintings and drawings by Salvador Dalí, into a museum. They founded the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg. At first they stored the collection in a wing of A. Reynolds Morse’s business, but it outgrew the space. So they moved the entire Salvador Dalí Museum to a space in St. Petersburg that had previously been used as a marine storage warehouse. The museum is still located on St. Petersburg’s waterfront, but has moved to a new location and is now operated by the state of Florida. [More]

According to a survey conducted this spring by the Pew Research Center, people worldwide say that women and men should have equal rights. But, researchers discovered, the same people who make this claim also believe that women are far from having achieved equality. Women living in the United States and Europe are especially discouraged by the lack of progress toward equality and women’s rights, the study showed....

How does the self storage industry stack up against other industries when it comes to equal rights between men and women? Are women members of the club? Women in the industry walk a careful line when they are asked about this issue. Many women in self storage, like Pam Alton of Mini-Management Services, and Nancy Gunning of Chesapeake Resources, feel strongly that they have not experienced any barriers to success as a result of being female. [More]