America Moves from Churches to Self-Storage

Demolishing St Charles Church in Dover NH
CC Jean Stimmell: 2017

Across our country, churches are being abandoned, demolished, or repurposed into  hip businesses and condominiums. Meanwhile, self-storage units are breeding like the Japanese beetles in my garden because we can no longer shoehorn any more stuff into our homes.  It appears we have forsaken the spiritual goal of becoming one with everything to embrace the consumer creed of having one of everything.

Statistics don’t lie: self-storage facilities have become  a $40 billion-a-year industry with over 49,000 storage facilities nationwide.^⁠1  More than 10% of Americans now rent units, giving each of us 5.9 square feet of storage space if it was divided up equally. 

This trend defies logic. When I was growing up in the 1950s, families were larger than they are now, but our houses were half the size – yet still big enough to hold all our stuff. Why, then, one must ask, do we need off-site storage now. One primary reason is because Madison Avenue, in cahoots with Wallstreet, has conned us into buying ever more stuff. It has been said this corporate advertising campaign is the largest single psychological project ever undertaken by the human race.^⁠2 And one that will have a sorry ending.

 Back in the day, when houses were small, we fixed old stuff when it broke.  It’s empowering to use our ingenuity to restore things to working order. After all, having evolved from tool-using primates, it’s in our genes.  I know the satisfaction I get from fixing things around the house. I get particular pleasure from working on my Farmall Cub tractor that I inherited from my father, who bought it in 1946, after coming home after fighting in WWII.

Things were built to last back then and, because customers did much of their own repair, they were designed to be easy to work on. In the process of ratcheting up the disposable society, we have lost all that, and in the process, stripped away the sense of dignity and integrity that comes from living a simple lifestyle based on self-sufficiency, a way of life fundamental to our forebearerse.

Today we can neither sell nor give away our stuff – that is no longer the newest and coolest on the block – because no one else wants it either. At least we could take those excess possessions to the landfill to give them a proper burial. But no, that would force us  to face up to our mindless addiction. So we do the easy thing and put it in self-storage, out of sight, out of mind. And  then, all too often, in the end, abandon it to the auctioneer’s gavel.

In the big scheme of things, what good is all this stuff? We are born onto this earth without stuff and will leave it without stuff, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That being the case, why do we mindlessly accumulate it?

Paul Wachtel has a compelling answer in his book, The Poverty of Affluence, written back in 1983. He suggests our commitment to consumption is a frantic attempt by us, as individuals, to buy stuff as a substitute for the group solidarity and sense of community that used to give our lives meaning – that is until economic growth tore it apart.

Buying more stuff can be an escape from tedium. But, in the end, our precious possessions will mean nothing, as they lay scattered haphazardly about the landscape, like bones beneath an owl’s nest from what was left of her prey.

xxx

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¹ https://www.sparefoot.com/self-storage/news/1432-self-storage-industry-statistics/

² Alan Kanner & Mary Gomes, “The All-consuming self” in Ecopsychology, ed. Theodore Roszak, 1995