By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
The Storage Room manager Jon Grondolski shows row
upon row of lockers. They are filled with stuff
that can't fit into homes.

---

It’s a packrat’s race
out there!

By Burl Burlingame
Star-Bulletin

SPACE, the final frontier. Just as Americans are squeezing into small apartments and condos in record numbers, and homes are being built simpler and cheaper, they're being overwhelmed with stuff. We're talking piles of stuff, bales of stuff, wagon-loads of stuff.

Unless you're into living with your stuff stacked to the rafters, you have two choices: jettison your excess baggage, or find a new home for it.

One of the few growth industries in Hawaii's depressed economy, it seems, is the public-storage business. These are essentially subdivided warehouses, cut up into various-sized lockers -- a safe, dry place to park your stuff.

"We're a quiet industry" that keeps growing, said Carol Foster, district manager for Public Storage, a nation-wide chain with four outlets on Oahu (and another opening this summer).

"I think it's because a lot more people are moving in and out of homes, and it's easier to keep some stuff in a secure area instead of having to move it constantly.

Storage has become a necessity for many people, said Steven Ito, operations manager at E-Z Access Storage Systems in Kakaako. "We're packrats, we have an excess of stuff. Whether we need it or not, it exists, and it has to be put somewhere."

"It's about 50-50, split between household items and businesses," said Jack Peterson, customer service representative for A-American Self Storage. "The household things are stuff a family wants to hang on to, and they don't have the space at home or they don't use it very often, and businesses store records or products."

"We have all sorts of stuff in here, but on the average, I'd say it's mostly household items," said Jon Grondolski, manager of The Storage Room in Kakaako. The only rules -- nothing flammable, nothing perishable.

Bruce Waters refers to his neat locker at E-Z Access as "my home away from home," and no wonder; he lives on the beach. His stuff is organized into Action Packer tubs and coordinated, and he's decorated the inside of the locker door with posters.

"I keep everything here I don't need right away, and the price is right," said Waters. "I get the best deals I can, and now I'm paying $31.50 for three months in a four-by-four-by-two locker, safer and dryer and cleaner than a car trunk."

Another type of seasonal customer, said Ito, are Europeans who spend a couple of months hiking and camping in the islands, and use storage lockers as a kind of base camp.

Jonas and Diane, a Kaaawa couple, rent a large locker at The Storage Room where they keep furniture, exercise machines and a motorcycle.

"It's a great space-saver, and they give us a good rate," said Jonas, wrestling out folding chairs. "And it's better than having a motorcycle in the living room."

What's stored is anything and everything, and it's not necessarily prime material. "You know the saying, one man's trash is another man's treasure?" said Peterson. "That's really true in the storage business."

Lockers do get abandoned, for a variety of reasons. After a period of time, the storage operators auction off the contents.

"Like most storage business, we wait at least 90 days before disposing of the locker," said Grondolski. "Our goal is never to auction it off, but sometimes we have to"

Just in case you're wondering, while technically a locker renter can get back his possessions by bidding on them, that doesn't mean the debt is forgiven. The money raised is remanded to a collection agency, who will keep hounding the deadbeat renter.

But in general, the stuff abandoned is ... ?

Ito paused and considered the question, and then ploughed ahead. "What people abandon," he said, "is generally just ... junk. It's rubbish. If it was good stuff, they wouldn't abandon it."

The real question is, why have these lockers become necessary?

"Our culture depends on stuff, and people hold on to it more than they used to," said Foster.

One reason may be that the old family homestead simply doesn't exist any more. The grandparents are packing it in and moving to condos, and cherished family possessions become an added responsibility for their children, who are busy moving from small apartment to small apartment. "They have to take everything with them, or lose it," said Foster.

Glenn Mason, a preservation architect who works with homes both new and old, says there has been a "dramatic" increase in closet size over the years. "When you design a new home now, that's one of the main questions we get -- how much storage space will there be. Older homes simply didn't have a lot of closet space. Even the Walker Estate, which is something like 9,000 square feet -- there are no closets big enough to walk into. And we've gone into the small houses built by the military here before World War II, and there's virtually no closet space."

Older homes used storage space in different ways, said Mason. "Ceilings were a bit higher, and in places like the kitchen, storage cabinets went all the way to the ceiling instead of stopping short. But the older kitchens didn't have all the appliances that are used today, either.

"Attics were more used for storage. And houses on posts, like many plantation-era homes -- you could store stuff under the house, and many people did. They they still do."

Another recent feature is the enclosed garage.

"Even in houses designed in the 1960s and '70s, you didn't see enclosed garages. The garage was just a carport, a place to keep the car. But now, they're expanded as additional storage space. It's where you keep everything EXCEPT the car."

"The reason is, simply, that people just have more stuff; more things, more clothes, more toys, and they're not satisfied with what they've got, so they get more. It's a consumer economy, and when you consume, you've got to put it somewhere."