I Toured My Mother’s Storage Units and Learned Something About American Life I Never Understood (2024)

This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

In a sleepy Washington state beach town roughly five miles from the U.S.–Canada border, you’ll find Birch Bay Storage. Last December, my mom, 64, reached out her car window to punch in a code that opened the electric gate. She was reluctant to unlock her unit, sensing that something she cherished was crushed under heavy boxes and Rubbermaid bins. In the dark recesses, I could see items precariously stacked 14 feet high.

Next to a couch tipped on its side, she showed me a landscape painting by my grandmother. She found a broken frame that she planned to fix. She put both items in the back car seat along with a kid-sized plastic Santa. When I asked why she couldn’t use the trunk, she told me it was full. Just like her closets and garage were also full. She pulled out a cracked plastic bin filled with charred pots and pans and a random bag of marshmallows from the early aughts.
Another bin contained just tank tops. “Why did I think I needed that many tank tops?” she laughed.

As we drove away, having made a small dent in a mountain containing furniture, old clothes, and family ephemera, we passed another unit with a red lock, signifying the individual hadn’t paid their bill. My mom had one red-lock day in the past, but she’d consistently paid her monthly bill and was now downsizing at her own speed, when her high blood pressure allowed.

In the U.S., there are an estimated 52,000 self-storage facilities, covering 2.1 billion square feet‍—‍enough for 6 to 7 square feet for every American. The self-storage market is expected to be worth $50 billion by 2029. The industry itself is the perfect union—a service that fulfills a human need and a growth investment that can thrive during historical shifts, such as the dot-com boom and bust, the Great Recession, and COVID-19. One recent survey found that 38 percent of Americans use self-storage, spending an average of between $75 and $185 month, usually due to one of the four Ds: death, divorce, dislocation, and a disputed fourth D, which toggles between disaster and downsizing, depending on the source.

Overconsumption certainly played a role. In the ’90s, stock values quadrupled, and Americans flexed their purchasing power. My family made regular trips to the mall, shopping at Sears, the Bon Marché, and Claire’s. Credit card debt also soared by 53 percent during what has been dubbed the “decade of debt” by the progressive think tank Demos.

In 1994, my mom signed the paperwork for her first unit with Birch Bay Storage. She had lost my father to brain cancer in 1991. A 31-year-old widow with three girls under age 11, my mom moved from Seattle to Birch Bay, where she met my stepfather. In 1992, she got a divorce when it was clear he was dependent on drugs and alcohol. “I had to be very sneaky,” she told me, in order to maintain full custody of my newborn sister. The need for a second storage unit arose when we moved and continued moving for six years.

Over the phone, my mom explained that the early ’90s were like a “dark alley” she didn’t want to wander down. Together, we tried assembling a timeline of the places we’d lived: a tent, a hotel room, with family members, and in rentals in several cities in Washington state. Those years were about survival—an effort to escape another D that could be added to the reasons people rent storage units: domestic abuse. (Women are more likely to have units than men.) Despite a restraining order, my stepdad always found out where we were staying and maintained an unyielding presence in our lives until he died in 1997. By that point, we’d returned to Birch Bay, attempting to regain stability after moving seven times.

The Great Recession was really the inflection point that proved the storage industry could thrive amid an economic tailspin. In late 2009, more than 15 million people were unemployed.
That same year, foreclosure filings hit a record high of nearly 4 million homes lost. Between 2007 and 2009, family homelessness rose by 30 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Americans didn’t simply have too much stuff and nowhere to put it: People had lived through the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, and many had nowhere to go.

Where the housing market was in sharp decline, the self-storage industry was the one area of Real Estate Investment Trusts—investments sold on the stock exchange—that were delivering growth, with 5 percent return during an economic nosedive for housing values. While people may have been forced to rent, move into smaller places, or live with family, they didn’t want to give up all they owned.

And if people could no longer afford to pay the cost of storage, the facilities could always hold an auction. Shows like Auction Hunters, Storage Hunters, and Storage Wars began to personify the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”—except with objects of value, monetary or sentimental, on the line.

I assumed that because my family was already low-income, we’d somehow weather the storm, just as we always had. I was wrong. In 2009, my mom filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

In 2012, after missing three mortgage payments, she was encouraged to do a short sale by her bank, Washington Mutual, a subprime-mortgage pusher and the largest bank to fail in U.S. history. She was offered roughly $4,000 to walk away from a property—worth $350,000 today—to avoid foreclosure. She owed over $5,000 in missed payments, and without the ability to make the full payment, she didn’t feel she had a choice. That year, she rented two more storage units for a total of four.

Around that time, I lost my barista job in Seattle, and my mom and I moved into a cheap one-bedroom apartment in Beaverton, Oregon. Since then, my mom has mostly lived with family members. In a way, storage remains her most fixed address, an extension of home.

But she’s never stopped collecting things for the house she hopes to own one day. During weekly phone calls, I’d catch her in the middle of staining a table, reupholstering a chair, or rewiring a chandelier she’d found at a flea market. Then, there was Amazon. Gone were the days of ordering items seen on TV; now there was a bottomless shopping cart.

My siblings and I whispered to each other about mom’s hoarding, a term she rightly hated. She was a “collector.” She liked pretty things. Hoarders lived in filth, exposed on shows like Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive. With cameras turned on typically low-income people with decades-old yogurt cups in the fridge, people who couldn’t throw things out were stigmatized in a way that persists. In 2013, hoarding disorder was added as its own category to the DSM-5.

Two impulses pushed my mom’s habit beyond clutter: ordering things online and saving everything because each item held a memory, a meaning, a story. Two lamps weren’t just two lamps, but the best outing she spent antiquing with my grandmother before she passed away from Alzheimer’s disease. Two oak chairs weren’t just two oak chairs, but beautiful 100-year-old antiques my dad carefully refurbished and nicknamed “Grandma” and “Grandpa.” When one of the chairs was damaged in storage, she was deeply hurt. Already knowing the answer, I asked her if she threw it out. She replied knowingly: “Me, throw anything out?”

Storage provided a place to keep things at a safe distance from familial judgment. After six years of renting four storage units, my mom finally narrowed it down to one. Or at least that’s what I thought. When I visited that storage unit in Birch Bay last year, I learned that there was a second. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “I have a big one and a little one.” By that point, I’d learned to have more compassion—storage wasn’t just a space the size of a room, it was a fixture “always there … it’s always on my mind,” she said.

When wealthy people hoard, there’s a tongue-in-cheek response. In 2022, fans of The Kardashians watched Kim step into a warehouse filled with 30,000 items of clothing. “I’m a memory hoarder,” she later said.During the 2022 show The Great American Tag Sale with Martha Stewart, Joy Behar called Stewart “a high-class hoarder.” They’re forgiven for their massive accumulation of stuff because the stuff is perceived as valuable, with perhaps even cultural significance. My mom’s belongings juxtaposed 20^th-century blue-and-white graniteware next to a moldy couch.

As of 2024, the monthly storage facility occupancy rate remains high at around 84 percent. For the many individual business owners who operate more than half of the country’s facilities, new technology has allowed for fewer employees, and self-storage is easy money thanks to the most basic truth: After people move stuff into storage, it’s a pain to move out.

Between 2020 and 2021, it became clear that the self-storage industry was not only “recession-proof.” Extra Space Storage Inc. and Public Storage were 97 percent full during the pandemic, according to the Wall Street Journal. The same four Ds applied: death, divorce, dislocation, and disaster/downsizing.

But there are other reasons people need storage. Many homeowners association rules forbid boats and RVs in driveways and side yards. As summer approaches, I’m bombarded with emails about student storage discounts (despite no longer being a student). Year-round housing isn’t standard practice, which leaves students facing housing insecurity with nowhere to go.

In New York, where more than 118,000 eviction notices were filed over the past year, the Human Resources Administration will pay storage fees for many people who are residing in homeless shelters, hotels, motels, or temporary shelters. In Austin, where I live now, the city launched the Violet KeepSafe Storage program, which set up hundreds of bins for people to hold important documents, keepsakes, and other personal items. These belongings are routinely tossed during encampment sweeps that target people facing homelessness—an issue magnified by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that further discriminates against people without a home.

Rents have increased 30 percent since 2017, and housing in the U.S. remains in short supply. Without any guarantee of where they will go next, people across generations are having to make quick decisions about where they will put their belongings until they find a stable, affordable place to live.

The cost of dislocation is very real. Unless people start making the connection between a lack of affordable housing and storage use, it’s not likely the narrative will shift from an overconsumption issue to an inequity issue.

When I visited Birch Bay again in July, my mom and I sat down at the kitchen island and calculated how much she’d spent on storage fees since 1994. When I finally did the math, I reminded her that I was in nearly six figures of student debt and was in no position to judge. Self-storage had cost her approximately $106,000, a staggering amount considering that since 1991, my mom has mostly relied on an annuity from my dad’s death that brought in roughly $12,000 annually.

I struggled to reconcile that the money my mom put toward storage fees could have been enough for another down payment on a house. But I was missing the point. She was trying to maintain a grip on normalcy—waiting for a time when she could set up her antique farm table and favorite dish set and gather her kids and grandkids for a home-cooked meal.

A couple of years ago she told me, “I think I know why people hoard. They’re tired of losing.” I sat down on a bench when she told me this because I finally understood. Loss was at the root of it. When you’re tired of losing, you hold on to whatever you can.