super storers

They rose up quietly to dot the landscape of America’s cities and suburbs, those ubiquitous orange garages of the self-storage business.

In one sense, every door opens to a story: The guy who needs a place to keep his vintage car. The single mom who is living with her parents while she tries to make ends meet, but needs her furniture when she moves out again. The college student home for the summer. The soldier leaving for Iraq. The dentist’s office that needs to get those old patient files out of the way.

But most storage units are rented for the same reason: Americans love stuff.

Although humans have been storing goods for thousands of years, the self-storage industry as we know it was born in the late 1960s in the Phoenix area. While hippies were busy giving away love and worldly possessions, mainstream Americans were building an industry around their pack-rat ways.

Now, one in 16 households rents a self-storage unit.

“We Americans love our stuff, don’t we?” said Mike Scanlon, president of the Self Storage Association trade group. “Hate to get rid of it.”

Scanlon argues that we don’t necessarily have more stuff than a few decades ago. We just moved the stuff someplace else.

“In the ’50s, we had a garage full of stuff and the car was parked in the driveway,” he said. “All we’ve done is moved that garage down the street so we can park inside again.”

Some would argue otherwise — that we are a society that keeps amassing more and more stuff, and we need a place to stash it.

Either way, those garages have become a necessity for many people. The storage industry has been growing 3 percent to 5 percent annually for the past two decades. Basements, garages, sheds and attics aren’t enough anymore.

The Colorado Springs area houses at least 125 storage facilities, according to the phone book, and industry experts say most facilities have 50,000 to 70,000 rentable square feet.

Let’s do the math. A conservative estimate is 6.25 million square feet of storage in Colorado Springs. That’s 144 acres of stuff packed away for a rainy day.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all clutter-laden slobs. Hank Saipe, president of the Colorado Self-Storage Owners Group, said people usually get a storage unit for a good reason.

“The biggest thing in the Colorado Springs market is the military, and the soldiers who are being sent overseas,” Saipe said.

Other reasons are usually tied to a time of transition: College. Marriage. Divorce. Empty nesters who are downsizing but want to hang onto possessions they can pass along to their kids. “Who is going to throw away the wedding album of your grandparents? It’s not going to happen,” Saipe said. “I think we are all savers, and (storage) makes it easy.”

At the same time, we seem to be accumulating more stuff and keeping that stuff around longer. Nationally, the average length of a storage unit rental used to be about nine months. Then it was closer to 12 months. Now, it’s moving toward 18 months.

“Look at all those trucks that deliver all that stuff to Super Wal-Mart,” Saipe said. “You see eight tractor-trailers of stuff going into Wal-Mart. Does that mean eight tractor-trailers of stuff are being thrown away that day? I don’t think so.”

Saipe, who also owns storage facilities, said most storage units are filled with regular things — furniture, clothes, records. One-third of units nationally are rented by business professionals, mostly to store old files.

Despite “The Silence of the Lambs,” storage units rarely hold human heads or much of anything exotic. Still, the regular stuff is priceless to its owners, a lesson hammered home by the fact that they’ll pay $500 a year or more just to keep it around.

“People have a hard time letting go. We get comfortable, and we want to hang on to what feels comfortable,” said Lois Fisher, who runs Avantí Organizing in Colorado Springs.

“They get attached to the strangest things, too.”