So THAT'S What They Mean by Self-Storage!

Sometimes you have to get out of rural Maine to recognize broad cultural trends, especially emerging ones. In June 2001 my daughter and I hit the road to look at college campuses. We exited Maine on U.S.-2 and wended our way across northern New England and into New York for our first stop, Skidmore College. All told, we visited ten colleges in seven states over eleven days. We saw a lot of the upper Midwest.

There were three things that we saw too many of: single-occupant vehicles (particularly SUVs), golf courses, and the newest of the three, self-storage facilities. Let me dismiss the first two quickly. We all know about Americans' over-reliance on the automobile. Idling in congested commuter traffic on Chicago's freeways (there's a misnomer) reinforced my conviction that cheap gasoline is a curse. As for golf courses, they swallow up wildlife habitat and farmland to benefit relatively few people. They are an ecological scourge.

So what about self-storage units? At the time we joked about how Americans have so much STUFF that they cannot fit all of it in their domiciles anymore. There are houses for people and now houses for their stuff. Remote storage seems a tacky testament to modern consumerism and excess.

Now for the newest trend, reuniting people with their stuff. This is no joking matter, as explained in the N.Y. Times earlier this week. People facing foreclosure on their homes need to park their stuff temporarily, so they turn to self-storage units. Problem is, the people who cannot keep up with their house payments also tend to fall behind on their storage rentals, thereby running the risk of having their stuff auctioned off. The solution for some people is to walk away from the house and move in with their stuff (storing themselves, as it were), which must drive local code enforcement officers crazy. My suggestion: put car pads next to the storage units and use retired SUVs for housing.

For more on the booming storage industry (and on the vultures who descend on the property auctions), go here:
Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage

[update, May 14, 2009--]
James Quinn at Minyanville has calculated the following: "Americans have accumulated so much stuff that their McMansions can’t contain it all. In 1984, there were 6,601 self-storage facilities with 290 million square feet space; in 2008, there were 51,250 “primary” self-storage facilities representing 2.35 billion square feet - an increase of more than 2.0 billion square feet. There's 7.4 square feet of self-storage space for every man, woman and child in the nation; thus, it's physically possible that every American could stand -- at the same time -- within the space we've allotted to self storage."