My family does not have a garage. And no, we don't rent any self-storage units, either. We were afraid that if we had the space provided by these, we'd fill them up with stuff.
Our neighbor next door has a two-car garage, but he has to leave his vehicles in the driveway. There are too many plastic paint cans, boxes, plumbing supplies, and rubber chickens cluttering it up so there's no room in there for his Beamer.
As availability of cheap fossil fuels declines, our piles of stuff will get smaller. It'll be too expensive to make some things; many things. And it will become too costly to make things in far-off places where cheap labor (another kind of energy) can be exploited and goods can be shipped profitably halfway across the globe. The "warehouse on wheels" will fail as a business model.
Manufacturing may return to our United States. It'll be cheaper to just make stuff here again, to avoid high transportation costs.
Anyways, my feeling is that the future will look more like the past than the present. Our sons and daughters will have to work harder for less.
