Stashing a Mountain of Our Stuff

In America today, people can become millionaires from selling little more than empty space.

But the phenomenal rise of the self-storage industry is more than a tale of fantastic profits and a booming investment trend. It speaks to changing living patterns since the 1970s, and the ambivalent relationship some people have with their stuff--the growing mountain of possessions they’ve accumulated even as personal attachments come and go.

Storage lockers hold the artifacts of a new era of divorce, fragmenting families and serial monogamy. They contain the residue left as one phase of life yields to another in a parade of personal transitions--invisible but for the marks they leave on people’s souls, and the books and baseball mitts they leave in their wake.

“Behind the doors of storage sheds . . . is really the great American story: the accumulation of stuff,” said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of popular culture.

More than a billion square feet of storage warehouses blanket the nation. The industry leader, Glendale-based Public Storage Inc., alone has sales expected to top a half billion dollars this year.

Storage lockers on average make more per square foot than apartments. They cost little to build and maintain, and profit margins are staggering. Public Storage, for example, last year boasted a tidy profit of $154 million--45% of revenues.

Self-storage warehouses started to crop up in the early 1970s. Most were developed around airports in Western states, especially Texas, where basements were scarce. Almost as fast as they were built, they filled up.

By the late 1980s, thousands of blank, one-story boxes, with their trademark corrugated-iron garage doors, were springing up all over the country.

Even during the recession of the early 1990s, when capital dried up, occupancies rarely dropped below 80%. That’s pretty good for a business with such low overhead that a warehouse starts making money when it’s less than one-third full.

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Today, industry leaders are making stabs at increased sophistication. Pickup services are being introduced, and some new warehouses have added air conditioning and heat and seek to match the status of high-class retail businesses.

One sign of change is the evolving look of those notoriously ugly buildings. Nowadays they are often disguised as stores, offices, even lighthouses and castles. And where they once were tucked away among industrial properties, they now occupy prime retail spots.

People who use storage now range from the homeless to those who might be assumed to have plenty of space--among them movie stars such as Chuck Norris, who kept his files in self-storage lockers, according to his publicist. A quarter of the population is estimated to have used storage warehouses at some time or other, industry analysts say.

Just what’s behind the continuing boom is a bit of a mystery, even to insiders.

Storage companies are highly competitive and tend to be secretive. Many haven’t bothered much with market research, having found they can get along without it: “Mind you, all we are selling is empty space,” said Robert Brown of the Public Storage Assn., a trade group.

But social researchers say the explanations can be found in Americans’ more complex personal lives. The trend, said Thompson, is a reflection of new lifestyles, combined with a fetishizing of possessions that is peculiarly American.

Within the industry, the huge profits are usually explained by the notion that people today move more. The problem is, this isn’t true. On average, Americans uproot households less frequently than in the 1960s and 1970s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Besides, the average length of time that people park their stuff in storage lockers is 18 months to two years, one major company has calculated, suggesting that many customers are not just temporarily in transit.

And new houses get ever more spacious, while the percent of the population living in apartments remains more or less the same.

Another explanation, that people are piling up more stuff, is hard to pin down.

Personal property, measured in lamp shades and photo albums, is not something the government tracks. Accumulation is only hinted at.

At the U.S. Department of Transportation, for example, analyst Felix Ammah-Tagoe has long puzzled over a strange trend in freight loads.

Over the last 35 years, the number of freight tons per capita--the sheer weight of goods being transported around the country per person--has increased 40%, creeping steadily upward to 28 tons per person per year, even as the material needs of industries have grown lighter. Where is all that tonnage going? “Household consumption,” said Ammah-Tagoe. “We seem to be accumulating more.”

George Bennett of the American Movers’ Conference says moving industry statistics show a similar trend: Since the late 1970s, the weight of the average household shipment transported by moving companies has climbed steadily upward, increasing 40% to nearly 3.5 tons from 1978 to now.

This despite the fact that the number of people per average household has dropped. “I guess we have reduced our number of children and replaced them with stuff,” Bennett quipped.

The rising sea of material goods alone doesn’t explain the self-storage trend, however.

Public Storage President Harvey Lenkin also credits the “organized chaos” of contemporary life.

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It’s not increased geographic mobility, but the dizzying new complexity of people’s personal lives at work, agreed Rand Corp. demographer Peter Morrison. It’s no coincidence that the rise of self-storage merges with the explosion in divorce, he said. People may not be moving households as much as in the past, but they are moving in and out of each other’s houses a lot more, according to Morrison.

“People are trailing a lot longer pasts in terms of stuff,” he said. They marry, divorce, move in and out of their parents’ homes, go back to school.

Among the young, these trends are especially pronounced.

The idea that more young adults prolong adolescence by living with parents is a distortion.

What’s really happening, said Fran Goldscheider, a professor at Brown University, is that fewer young adults are plucked from the family nest by marriage.

Among these Generation Xers, marriage is out, roommates are in, live-in lovers come and go, and frequent transition is the rule. Their unions with live-in sexual partners are nearly as fragile as roommate relationships--and when these unions end, they are more likely to end up back with parents than are divorced spouses, Goldscheider said, adding her own explanation for the growth of self-storage: “A population without a home.” Fragmenting families have spurred the formation of households, so that today there are fewer people per household--2.3 on average--than in the 1970s. A quarter of households today are a single person living alone--nearly twice the rate of 1960, according to the Census Bureau.

People connect, then part. Households form, dissolve and re-form. Each new life phase requires a new dispensation of stuff. Her coffee table? His couch?

“It just means more stuff passing through our lives,” agreed Dow Jones market analyst and demographer Peter Francese, who believes that “what’s really powering the storage industry is serial monogamy.”

Francese himself recently recombined households with his wife, who had been living in a different city for career purposes. The couple now keep their canoe, along with “boxes of stuff,” in a storage locker for lack of room in his house. “It’s criminal. Think of how much money I would have in an IRA if I had never bought any of that stuff,” he said.

The complex motivations involved in storing possessions are reflected in the problem of delinquency, which is rife in the industry, said Drew Whitney, editor of Inside Self Storage, a trade magazine.

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The unspoken assumption in storage is that very often renting costs more than the value of what’s stored. Given a little time to think about it, many customers “realize that they don’t need all this junk and they just stop paying,” said Whitney, who recently moved her stuff out of storage because she and her husband got a bigger house.

“I hate my stuff,” Whitney added. “But what I really hate is my husband’s stuff. He has cases and cases of old school papers and books and oil cans and paint cans. Boxes of balls and mitts. . . . Why does he need all this stuff?”

Market statistics kept by the Public Storage Assn. suggest that the growth in storage space has increased, not lessened, demand.

In the early days of storage, a market with 2.2 square feet of storage space per person was considered saturated, said Brown, the association’s chief. Today, markets will support much more space--3.6 square feet per person--before rents flatten out, he said.

Chad Landers, 28, and Karen Baker, 36, are a case in point. The Sherman Oaks couple first rented a storage locker after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, when they were forced to move out of their condominium while it was repaired. They soon moved back in. But it was too late: “Once you have a storage locker, it’s hard to get rid of it,” said Landers, sounding dour. “The stuff seems to multiply.”

He was looking over the contents of their $89-per-month locker: picture frames, a French dictionary, an ironing board, a sleeping bag, a transparent blue water bottle containing a few handfuls of loose nickels. Some items are sentimental. Some are just junk. And some--such as Landers’ old microwave--are a kind of hedge, his girlfriend said.

Although the pair have been living together happily for two years, “if we ever did split up, I could set him up really nicely,” Baker explained as Landers’ eyebrows shot up. “But that’s not why I’m keeping it, honey!” she added hurriedly. “It’s just something to consider.”

Trailing the past in the form of old couches, childhood toys, boxes of school papers: Syracuse’s Thompson says it’s really about identity.

“We define ourselves by material goods,” he said. “But it’s hard for people to throw away what once defined them. . . . So the storage shed is just the perfect thing. You can get rid of stuff but still have the security it’s still there.”

Such hoarding is born of people having little connection with ancestors, ancestral homes and traditions, he said. The genius of self-storage is giving “people a place to put the stuff that may replace having a history, a community.”

Roy Oliveras, a 26-year-old Los Angeles storage employee and customer, agrees that his locker represents a bit of personal history enshrined. It allows him to hold on to his son’s childhood. “His little first tricycle is in there,” he said. “He’s working on training wheels, but I just have to keep it.”

And the mini-refrigerator, the saltwater aquarium, and the Cardio-Glide exercise machine?

Oliveras shrugged.

“There is just no room for it in my house,” he said.