I tell my nieces and nephews the thing to do is to avoid accumulating stuff in the first place. They probably think I’m nuts though. There is some pleasure in deciding you want something and some initial reward once you own it. But then it seems to wear off and the cycle repeats. We were renters for many years which helped minimize the amount we own. When I walk around the neighborhood I’d say that only 10% of the garages actually have cars in them. For the rest they’ve become a local storage locker, boxes that may not have been opened in years stacked in rows and rows.
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I really enjoyed listening to that essay. Thanks for posting, @Marilyn
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I’m proud to say that we’ve always put our cars in the garage not junk. This house has a three car garage and the last bay is empty. It gives me a lot of joy to know that we don’t have junk to fill it. If it’s not in the house, we don’t need it/want it. There’s plenty of space for the garage stuff on the edges. And we hang the bikes.
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Same. We have a 3 car garage and keep two cars inside it, and the remaining area is for younger S’s woodworking, etc.
We keep our garage pretty organized and can’t believe how many neighbors can’t fit their cars into their garages bc of clutter.
People have too much stuff! 
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Now that we live in the north and have a basement, I don’t know how southerners do without one!
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That’s why there is no room in our garages!
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Yes, basements are key!
We have enough storms and big trees, and the occasional hail that we’ve always kept the cars in the garage. We’re down to one car now and have a two car garage so there is more stuff in there than we used to have.
One person’s filled garage is another person’s basement is another person’s attic…
Glass half full…maybe the garage is full because the owner has gotten the stuff OUT of the house and the garage is the next stop before donating/recycling/selling…
We have a two car garage - my car ALWAYS gets parked in the garage because it’s important to me. There would be plenty of room for H to park his SUV in the garage too…if he would bother to disseminate all the stuff he has collected and will not take time to get rid of. I look at that side each garbage week and think, “what can I toss?” - but none of it is mine and I pretty firmly believe that I can beg and plead for him to go through it all, but it is not in my jurisdiction to get rid of it.
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Although we live in the south, we did have a large basement at our previous home. I miss it, and H has not yet adjusted. He filled two storage units, mostly with his garage and basement stuff, when the house sold. There was no room at our temporary home. He’s now emptying the storage units into the garages of our new house, so we can’t park in them - yet. I am determined that my side will be cleared out for parking by Labor Day, one way or another. I refuse to drive a car that’s 140 degrees inside just because he doesn’t want to part with a decade’s worth of potential project material.
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I’m in the West here, why do we need a basement?
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We left our last basement house in ‘99. If there’s nowhere to store “stuff,” you just don’t have any. Problem solved. 
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In support of basements, they can serve other useful purposes beyond storage of junk. In older homes, that is the main spot for laundry. A great open play area for young kids to do fun stuff - especially in the midwest winter when outside weather is too extreme (my son spent HUNDREDS of hours playing hoops on his Little Tykes basketball hoop in the winter). In the summer, basements are often the coolest temperature spot in the house! Basements are the location of many home family rooms, or recreational space for a ping pong table, pool table, etc.
But yep, they do sometimes become a dumping spot. Like an attic. And both are a pain to deal with when you have to climb stairs to retrieve things!
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We have a daylight basement in this new to us house. It is a home to our exercise room, wine room, and my home “office.” No junk storage is allowed except for some Christmas decor stuff and things that we use only occasionally (but annually, like luggage or skis). 
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This!
I hate the basement. It’s just another place to keep stuff we really don’t need. I wouldn’t miss having a basement (and less rooms) at all.
We have a three car garage. The third bay holds the snowblower, the big generator, extension ladders, kayaks and all of our garden stuff. If we didn’t have that third bay, we would need a shed, and I flatly refused to get a shed.
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We have an oversized 2 car garage so in the back H has built shelves that we store things on and he has room on one side for tools and a workbench and the washer and dryer are on the other side. I like the amount of storage we have because we can’t accumulate so much stuff.
We have an unfinished basement plus crawl space in this house, so we’ve always made sure there was enough room for two cars (and as many as 7 bikes) in the two car garage. When we added 3rd car for the teens, we laughed when they asked which one would be on the street. If you’re old enough to drive, you’re old enough to scrape the windshield (and all the windows) on the hand-me-down minivan.
The basement and crawl space have definitely accumulated tons of stuff (mine and my mom’s - she had a small apartment). I’ve working my way through declutter / reorg on that and the kid bedrooms. We’re in no hurry, so I’m ok with slow progress… as long as it is continuous.
Today’s project is going through all the old folders and binders and spriral notebooks (the few used pages torn out; actually had some fun looking at it all) that I’ve collected from various locations in the house over past months. Will keep a some and try to get rid of the rest.
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I grew up with a basement that was used as @abasket describes above, but it was “finished,” so not a place to store random stuff. My dad built it out with a laundry room, a play room (that did get messy), a pantry, a summer/winter clothes closet, and a large open room with a pool table that got hours of use. I remember those basement years fondly.
The one basement house that DH and I owned in MA was sectioned into his work shop and my sewing space, but it did have an area that accumulated “stuff.” When we relocated to AZ, we did a brutal purge of the entire house as we were paying for the move ourselves and it was by weight, every pound = $$, so we began life in AZ very light. I can’t say that DH doesn’t have a lot of “stuff” today, but it’s mostly workshop-related so, as @abasket also said above, not my “jurisdiction.” Since we bought the cabin last year, most of DH’s workshop is now in Maine, so the AZ garage looks respectable again but the problem has traveled with us. Sigh.
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We are in the process of finishing our basement. It’s forced us to do a big purge since we’ll have much less space for junk to just gather.
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We have a walkout daylight basement, but I do not like it. I spend as little time down there as possible. I find it cold and dark and I don’t like either of those things. I love it warm so I only go down there when I need to for laundry or taking care of the cats’ food and litter. My spouse has his office down there since he started working from home during COVID. I would be just fine to not have a basement at all myself.
Uses of our basement over the years:
Office (for 9 years until we built an addition - it worked great for DH to be out of the main part of the house when our kids were young and rambunctious)
Gym with weights and treadmill
Tool room
Billiards room
Place for extra refrigerator
Utility room with oil furnace, wood boiler, water heater, and well pump
Space in daylight basement to keep dogs when it’s raining or we’re gone part of the day
Storage
I honestly can’t imagine not having it.
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