More space but less room

More space but less room

by Garrison Frost

It seems like every time I round a corner in the South Bay, I am confronted with a new self storage facility. It’s hard to miss them, actually, as most of them are painted orange or some other alarming color. They hardly creep up on you. Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Lomita, San Pedro, Harbor City – these giant things are everywhere.

As much as these facilities have been sprouting up like weeds, you don’t hear all that much about it. In the South Bay, when one talks about development, one is usually talking about residential development. In the glare of mansionization, who can see one or two or 50 new commercial warehouses?

It would seem kind of odd that this growth in self storage comes at a time when one would think South Bay residents are best able to store their own things. Entire blocks of the South Bay have been scraped for new residential development in recent years, and never once have we seen an older house replaced by a smaller house. Cottages that were between 1,000 and 2,500 square feet are now being replaced by homes that stretch to the property line and up to the allowable height limit to accommodate 3,000 to 6,000 square feet. What are people putting in these giant palaces that they don’t have enough room for the rest of their crap?

Who knows? But one thing we do know is that what’s happening in the South Bay is just an exaggeration of a trend happening throughout the country. According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average home size in the United States was 2,330 square feet in 2004, up from 1,400 square feet in 1970. During roughly this same period of time, according to the self storage industry’s biggest trade association, the number of facilities with rentable self storage in the United States went from fewer than 5,000 to nearly 60,000, representing an increase in square footage storage space from about 200 million square feet to nearly 2 billion square feet.

To illustrate how wacky the situation is, the trade association notes that there are nearly seven feet of self storage space for every man, woman and child in the country. Which means that it is physically possible that every American could stand – all at the same time – under the roof of a self storage facility.

Nearly one in 10 households nationwide rent a self storage unit. Given our tendency in the South Bay to wrench the most from a national trend, I would bet the rate is considerably higher here.

Which, of course, again begs the question: What are we storing? Boxes of clothes? All-terrain vehicles? Waterlogged surfboards? Shoes? Did our crap necessitate the larger home, or did the larger home encourage the accumulation of more crap?

By now the reader has probably concluded that this writer does not live in a South Bay mansion. Otherwise, I’d be able to answer some of these questions. I don't have more things than I can store. But for others, obviously, more space means less room.

(April 27, 2007)