The Cellar - Time, The American Dream, and Storage

An interesting look at the Self Storage Industry and the people who use them from The NYTimes.

The Self-Storage Self

Quote:

Statewide Self Storage spreads out near Highway 4 in Antioch, Calif., a suburban community between San Francisco and Sacramento. It’s a phalanx of long, low-slung buildings separated by wide driveways and lined with red doors. The complex houses 453 storage units and is wedged between a car dealership and a Costco.

It was the last afternoon in May, and the sun seared all the concrete and corrugated steel. Statewide’s gate opened, and a man named Jimmy Sloan made for the far corner of the property. Sloan, who dresses and styles his hair like James Dean, is a part-owner of the Harley-Davidson repair shop nearby. He rolled open the door of a 10-by-30-foot unit, the largest Statewide offers. It was his ex-fiancée’s, but still leased under his name, and packed with, among other things, a particleboard shelving unit, some wicker items, a microwave oven, a box labeled “Mickey’s Hornet Neon,” a floor lamp, a television and a wooden child’s bed standing on its end on a desk. It was hard to tell how deep the inventory went. “She hasn’t seen most of this stuff in six years,” Sloan said.

For five years, he stored most of it above the garage of his house. But he had to borrow on the house to keep the bike shop running, and last year, feeling in over his head, he opted to sell the house and downsize before he fell behind and risked foreclosure. “Pretty much got out of that house at zero — didn’t make a penny on it,” he told me with the kind of ascetic pride that wouldn’t have made any sense before our economically crippled era. Sloan’s fiancée insisted he rent a storage unit and move everything over the garage into it for her. So he did. Then they split up.

He kept paying the rent on the unit for almost a year — $217 every month. But Sloan finally lost his patience and told her: “You know, we’re not even together anymore. This stuff’s gotta go.” Everything here, he told me, was worth less than what he had paid to store it. “Storage is always a bad investment, any way you look at it,” he said. The rent was her responsibility now. But the former future Mrs. Jimmy Sloan never paid Statewide. By now, it seemed likely that the managers would end up auctioning off the contents of the unit in accordance with state law.

That was fine with Jimmy Sloan. But he wanted to get in first and make sure that his late father’s collection of hunting knives and die-cast toy tractors, which he’d lost track of, weren’t mixed in there. And so, to regain access, he’d just walked into the office and paid Statewide what was owed: $460. He’d counted out the cash unresentfully, like a man retrieving his dog from a neighbor’s house for the 10th or 11th time.

“That stuff is Happy Meal junk,” he now said, pointing to a see-through Rubbermaid bin in the storage unit’s brickwork of boxes.

continues:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/ma...age-t.html?hpw