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TODAY Monday 24 November 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Home Sweet Storage Locker

It is not too late for you to make a pile of money by opening a self-storage facility on cheap land at the edge of town. The average self-storage operation begins to make a profit when one third of its units are occupied. The national occupancy rate is now 80%.

A marvelous -- and unattributed -- story in The Los Angeles Times this weekend tells the story of one of the fastest-growing sectors in the American economy. There are now more than a billion square feet of consumer-storage space in the United States, up from close to zero in 1970. Demand climbs each year. Supply keeps pace thanks to low construction and maintenance costs and fabulous returns on investment: a storage space makes more of a profit than a typical apartment of comparable size.

What's funny is that no one can say how much stuff is now squirreled away behind those roll-up corrugated metal garage doors. There are no industry-wide statistics, and operators pride themselves on their ask-no-questions approach. Analysts estimate the volume by a process of elimination. Since the tons of freight per capita increases by about one percent per year, and since manufacturers are actually using fewer materials these days, the conclusion is that increasingly huge waves of household stuff keep moving around the country. Some of that stuff ends up in dwellings, which get bigger every year (and roomier too, since the average household now consists of only 2.3 people). But mobile mountains must be in self-storage.

A researcher at the Rand Corporation says that geographic mobility is a factor in the self-storage boom, but that more important is the fragmentation of the American household. Divorce is ubiquitous, as everybody knows, but there also seems to be a growing tendency for roommate relationships -- sexual and non -- to be susceptible to more frequent changes than heretofore. People live with each other for six months, a year, and then move on. Young adults move back in with their parents, then leave to share an apartment with a new partner, break up, move back to the nest, then decide to return to school. Lamps and couches and stereo systems go in and out of the self-storage locker.

Once upon a time, one felt constrained to choose between the nomadic and the accumulative. No longer. Now we can move around, migrate in and out of relationships, and not forego the satisfactions of the well-equipped life. There is the possibility, I suppose, that the wandering is self-perpetuating, that we are fated to be at sea, like the Flying Dutchman, only calling briefly at the ports of the self-storage operations to replenish our supplies of objects of reassuring permanence and belonging. But, no, I'm sure we will all settle down soon, re-synchronize our clocks to the pulses of nature, and grow nourishing food from a garden with a pleasing southern aspect.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Media watcher Tom Turner is back. Today and every Monday check into "In Other News...", Tom's review of environmental journals and environmental journalism. In this morning's installment, Tom casts a steady gaze at tern populations, Worldwatch, and High Country News.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"
11/17: World Cups (Soccer; C02)
11/14: Amtrak, My Amtrak
11/13: Tim Wirth's Excellent Adventure
11/12: Monsters of Wellesley, Massachusetts
11/11: Armistice Day and the Next Great War
11/10: Mea Maxima Culpa

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.