One afternoon in late May, a woman slouched inside one of Statewide’s narrow hallways, reorganizing the innards of her unit. She said her name was Elizabeth — no last name given, since, as she told me, “this is not a high-self-esteem moment.”

Most everything here belonged to Elizabeth’s parents, who entered assisted living last year, and she needed to clear it out to cut expenses. She was keeping an eye out for particular family memorabilia, but otherwise it was a long, beleaguering purge. “Just stuff? Like my mother’s kitchen stuff?” she told me. “Whatever.”

Boxed haphazardly inside the closet-size space was, as she put it, 53 years of married life. An empty pill bottle and an egg carton lingered on the little bit of visible floor space. “I got rid of all the furniture,” Elizabeth said, except her own drafting table, which, she pointed out, had wound up against the rear wall. She was an architect, accomplished but out of work (“Architecture is dead, dead, dead, dead,” she explained) and was attacking this project with a conspicuously architect-ish methodology.

She had brought with her dozens of new, perfectly uniform white boxes, each bearing the Harry Potter logo in one of several colors. They lined the hallway behind her, still flattened. “When the books come out, there’s just hundreds and hundreds of these boxes at every bookstore,” she said. “I just went around and got them.” She repacked and erected a tidy column of Harry Potter boxes in one corner of the unit. She turned a few others, tops folded inward, into a kind of bookshelf. “This was when ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ came out,” Elizabeth said. “They stack really nicely.”

She was going to transfer these boxes, full of the few things worth saving, into a storage unit she recently rented in a nearby town. That unit housed most of what Elizabeth owned. Forced to leave her parents’ old house and unable to afford a place of her own, she had moved in with a friend about eight months ago. As far as the storage industry was concerned, then, all the contemporaneous chaos of Elizabeth’s and her parents’ lives ultimately amounted to a wash: one old unit was being vacated, one new one was being rented.

In fact, since last year, owners around the country have reported quickening rates of both move-outs and move-ins, making any occupancy rate — the industry’s fundamental yardstick — feel kind of arbitrary, like the momentary averaging-out of a blur of activity, with no single, dominant trend (or maybe even logic) behind it. At Statewide, for example, those like Elizabeth renting smaller units — traditionally the backbone of the business — have been steadily leaving. “All I hear is, ‘I can’t afford it anymore,’ ” says Joe Dopart, who manages Statewide along with his daughter Amy and his wife, Evie, a retired schoolteacher. Renters tell the Doparts they’ll find a relative’s garage in which to keep their yearbooks, winter clothes or extra mattresses. Or they dump what they don’t need and downsize into a smaller, cheaper unit. (“To me,” Dopart told me, lowering his voice, “most of the stuff is just junk.”) At the same time, though, Statewide’s larger units — mostly empty for years — are now completely full. “Every single one, practically, has a foreclosure in it,” Amy told me. Others were being rented by endangered businesses, like a coffee shop and a tea room whose owners were forced to shutter their storefronts in Antioch’s struggling historic downtown and move everything into storage while they plotted their next moves.

The upshot, while this traffic runs both ways in the background, is that Statewide has remained about 88 percent full — about two or three points lower than last summer, right in line with the national estimate. But that may obscure a more meaningful shift. By shaking up the composition of renters, and their reasons for renting, the recession could be quietly tilting the character of American storage closer to what it was originally: a pragmatic solution to a sudden loss of space, rather than a convenient way of dealing with, or putting off dealing with, an excess of stuff.