New Jersey Teen's Storage Unit Dives Yield Treasure and Life Lessons

Michael Haskell spent $10 on his first storage unit, a cramped 5-by-5-foot locker at a New Jersey facility his mother drove him to during his sophomore year at Bergen County Academies in Hackensack. That modest outlay produced a solid profit and set off something considerably larger: the 17-year-old has since cleared more than 55 units, launched a YouTube channel and resale business called StorageHeroes, and founded a charitable operation called Storage Angels that routes recovered goods to organizations across Bergen County.

The pandemic-era reality show Storage Wars provided the initial spark. Watching strangers bid on the abandoned belongings of unknown people, Haskell concluded the practice was accessible, potentially lucrative, and, as it turned out, far more instructive than it appeared on television. He made his first move at the start of 10th grade. The results, both financial and personal, have compounded.

The 55-plus lockers he has cleared range in size up to 10 by 20 feet and have belonged to a strikingly varied cast of previous owners: deceased multimillionaire art collectors, Ivy League graduates, tradespeople, and ordinary residents. Among the recoveries: gold and silver pieces sold on 47th Street in Manhattan's Diamond District, sofas valued at $1,500, rugs worth $2,500, and an improbable haul of 30,000 New York City public school doorknobs. Some pieces have ended up at Sotheby's and Bonhams.

Bidding strategy blends instinct with research. Location matters, as does whatever is visible in preview photographs. Upscale neighborhoods tend to produce higher-value contents, but a unit packed with tools can quietly generate strong returns once listed. To manage the volume, Haskell assembled a team of movers and eBay listers. Even a small 5-by-5 unit can take five or six hours to clear. Larger units require logistical coordination that no single person can sustain alongside a full high school course load. That team structure became the backbone of StorageHeroes, which also produces short-form YouTube content built around tight editing rather than the extended, unfiltered format common in the genre.

The charitable arm, Storage Angels, grew from a different kind of reckoning. After clearing a particularly cluttered unit filled with antique toys, tools, and usable furniture, Haskell began researching what happens to the roughly 5 percent of storage lockers in the United States that go unsold at auction. About half, he discovered, end up as landfill waste. Storage Angels addresses that gap by requesting unsold units from facility managers or placing minimum bids on lockers unlikely to attract competing buyers. Recovered goods are donated to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and Never Alone Again, a Bergen County nonprofit.

What began as a teenager's bid to earn spending money became a business, a content platform, and a charitable operation, all before graduation. The deeper inventory, assembled one dusty locker at a time, turns out to be harder to appraise: an education in how people accumulate things, what they leave behind, and what can still be made useful from what others have long since discarded.