We’ve clearly got a lot of stuff.

Too much stuff, actually.

We look at abandoned homeless encampments and wonder how much junk one person can have.

People like Mike Wagner have given statements such as the preceding line a lot of thought.

That is why he is a wealthy man today.

Wagner quit his job in 2011 as a physical therapist and bought a self-storage complex.

Today — after a number of  lucrative self-storage investments — he offers his services as a consultant on how to manage and make self-storage facilities profitable.

Self-storage, if you haven’t noticed, is a big business in Manteca.

And it is going  to get bigger.

There are four mini-storage projects either approved or proposed in Manteca. The list includes:

*The largest mini-storage ever envisioned in Manteca — 844 units — on Atherton Drive west of Airport Way. The site abuts Bella Vista Drive.

*A mini-storage complex on the westside of Airport Way north of the railroad tracks and south of Lathrop Road.  

*A mini-storage facility planned for Cottage Court south of Doctors Hospital behind Panera Bread.

*Expansion of the ARCO mini-storage on North Main Street north of Northgate Drive.

If all are built, Manteca will have 13 self-storage complexes.

That is roughly 5,000 or so units or one for every five homes.

Households aren’t the only users of self-storage.

Businesses use them.

Service groups that have supplies and equipment use them.

Even the homeless that want a safe haven for their good stuff that they can retrieve when they need it, use them.

Experts indicate data shows one out of every 10 Americans lease storage space. The same data says that once someone rents a space for more than a year they will end up staying five year on average.

With space rental rates north of $100 a month for just a 50 square-foot unit, it can be an expensive proposition.

Given most people aren’t going to call up some friends, rent a U-Haul truck and move stuff to another complex to dodge a $5 or $10 a month rent increase, self-storage is a pretty good business model.

And that’s before you toss in the fact it requires minimal staffing to run, storage complexes are relatively inexpensive to maintain, and other overhead is at a minimum.

Real estate storage analyst Spenser Allaway has been quoted as saying, “The only thing that competes with an existing customer is the trash can.”

It sound like a harsh assessment, but it isn’t.

Most of us know of friends or relatives that put stuff in storage such as inherited furniture they believe they would put to use one day and then dutifully paid storage fees for years.

In one case, almost five years and $4,400 in fees later, one couple decided they really didn’t want the furniture as it was too dated. Nor did they have any real use for most of the other items they had in storage

They ended up having a yard sale and then giving some of what was left over away, and trashing the rest. The dump fees ate into about half of their yard sale “profits.”

The self-storage business comes down to human nature.

There is a lot of chatter about us being a disposable society.

Instead of repairing an appliance, we replace it, but then sometimes won’t toss what was replaced because we might get some money for it.

We hold onto things we never use on the outside chance we will use them.

Sentiment enters the thinking process.

We see everything as heirlooms that we shouldn’t depart with or that we should hand down.

It’s been said that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

But the opposite is also true. One man’s treasure is another man’s junk.

We all approach “stuff” from different perspectives.

My mom and her two sisters are perfect examples.

All came of age during the Depression.

Grace, the oldest, retired as an emergency room nurse at St, Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco.

The fact she was single and made more than decent money allowed her to accumulate a lot of stuff in her eight-room flat.

So much stuff, that there were literally just walking spaces through half the rooms in the flat with boxes and stuff stacked up five feet or more.

Grace wasn’t a classic hoarder.

Yes, she bought a lot of things. If she say a teakwood table set she liked, she bought two. One was for herself and the other to one day give away to someone else. But instead, they’d be stacked awaiting her final decision.

Most of her early Ife had been hard and she had no real material things. Grace had an engaging personality and borderline spent like a sailor.

Lois, on the other hand, was frugal as all get out with the personality to match.

She’d go to yard sales to buy stuff to sell at her own yard sale.

She would literally save every srap of food for reuse later.

Perhaps the most telling incident was when she put a pair of her old dentures on a yard sale for 25 cents.

Lois had the same childhood as Grace.

Mom, because she had a two-car garage and a house with a basement, became the family storage facility.

When her older sisters died — or when any relative was downsizing into a smaller home and didn’t want to throw anything out. — it ended up in her garage or her basement. And most of it never went anywhere else.

She wasn’t happy about it, but she believed you shouldn’t just throw things out that still have value and could be used.

Long-story short, after mom passed away we ended giving away to thrift stores what was reusable and filling more than five large garbage containers.

People like to call me a minimalist after seeing my home for the first time, but I’m not.

I have what I need and then some including some “stuff” that is rarely seen or touched.

I admit to having been influenced by my mom and aunts.

It is one of the reason my closets and cupboards do not have doors.

Besides liking the look, it has prevented me from simply opening closet doors and throwing stuff in them as I have to look at the stuff every day if I did.

I do admit there is a 1992 Buick in my garage that doesn’t belong to me. It was a parting “gift” that a granddaughter’s ex-boyfriend left behind him when he returned to North Dakota. The other big item in my garage is a dining room set that doesn’t belong to me either.

You could take everything else in the garage that I actually do own and put it on a 50 square foot self-storage unit and still have plenty of room left over.

But to be honest, if push came to shove. I’d never do that. It consists of stuff that I haven’t looked at or used in years.

It’s bad enough I have the stuff that is either of marginal sentimental value or almost a non-existent need for, but I’m not about to pay $100 a month hanging on to stuff that anyone else would simply toss.

My goal is to get rid of essentially everything in the garage by this time next year.

That’s thanks in part to the fact I will be paying the City of Manteca for a 96-gallon garbage cart starting in November that is three-times larger than I actually need for the weekly trash I now create.