The Mother Ship

Over the past several months I've been a daily witness to the construction of yet another compound of personal storage pods. And, you guessed it...it's on Franklin Boulevard!

The brand new Extra Space Storage is a wrist rocket shot away from the long established Public Storage compound; both of which are within range of a seasoned longbowman to 49th Avenue Self Storage; which is less than a grenade launcher's range to the Mother Ship, Security Public Storage. I failed to mention National Self Storage because technically you can't see it while biking up and down Franklin Blvd; but it's less than a mile away from the Mother Ship.

The mother ship -- I watched her land about a year and a half ago. She overtook her host with deadly efficiency, a former supermarket that anchored a strip mall near Florin Road. There used to be a black owned BBQ place (which was pretty damn good, by the way) which won Best Actor in a Supporting Role. The other roles were held by other such stores selling Asian knickknacks, a T-shirt store, and other trappings of Asian American oriented consumerism. But when she suffocated the store, her tentacles enveloped all the other stores in the strip mall, and now are slowly tightening.

Actually, how would I know? I have never once checked into any of those ancillary stores to find out. But surely their businesses were counting on an anchor who would keep volume driving by slowly over the speed bumps and perhaps some of them would stop in. Not too many people nowadays come in and out of the Security bunker. And it is a bunker; all indoors, likely climate controlled, and you can now drive in and unload your stuff even when it's raining! The Motherbunker.

I have asked nearly everyone I know, "Have you noticed the explosion in personal storage places?" and no one seems to have noticed. They are everywhere. They fit into odd sized, vacant dirt on the fringes of other businesses, on the margins, backed up against freeways and railroads, and some are even two stories now to reduce their footprints in more dense suburbs. And I further ask "Do you have anything in one of these?" and the answer I always get is "No."

So who the hell is renting them and what the hell is being stored? -- not only do we not want to live without our stuff, we don't want to live with it either. So into the compound it goes, and the first months rent is free! Free! Doesn't cost you nothin'! My friend Mark at the CAISO once told me he rented one during a move, and had it rented so long that the cost of the unit far exceeded the value of the contents. So many are abandoned. My Father-in-Law lived out his retirement bidding on these bins sight unseen, to sell the contents at flea markets. Indeed...my 12 year old lawnmower was a former incarcerated member of one of these compounds.

This is one more symptom of our hyperconsumerism -- 1.875 billion square feet of storage space (four square feet per US resident), in 2005 -- and there have been thousands more added in the last three years, just like the two on Franklin Blvd. My guess -- they are being rented by all those who walked away from their mortgages to store their stuff so that in about three years, when their credit scores are back up and home sales are up and the economy is back up and their incomes are back up, they will buy another house and fill to the rafters with the regurgitated contents of the Mother Ship's rumen.