I left Philadelphia the morning that Hurricane Ida passed over the city, my plane barely missing the storm – we felt the turbulence on the way out. Historic flooding closed down the Vine Street Expressway, the Schuylkill swelled over its banks and onto adjacent roadways north through Manayunk and Roxborough. Long stretches of my regular bike route up to the farm were more than 10 feet underwater, and cars and buildings remained submerged for days. But in the leadup to the storm, I’d been caught up in my own pocket-sized drama: packing away all my worldly possessions into a wooden box, wrapped in a waterproof tarp and fastened with velcro.
I was living alone, and moving alone. Packing away my paraphernalia and detritus was a private activity that took place in the public street, parsing through extraneous dishes and clothes for donation, and subsequently tetrising everything I owned into the box. Fitting the bar-height wooden stools I’d designed and fabricated, welding the spindly metal legs and staining the wooden seats; stacking an unremarkable flowerpot I’d taken from my backyard in New Jersey, infested with the weedy growth of ailanthus altissima and their demon spawn, the lanternfly; (if you know, you know) the desktop computer I’d built one summer in Brooklyn to handle heavy graphics and cumbersome design softwares; monochromatic men’s button downs thrifted on Telegraph Avenue that I’d worn in the East Bay, to San Francisco, to New York, to Jersey, to Philly, and now back to California. It was a race against the rain that culminated in giving the Philly street cat –who I’d found in the trash one winter morning in the snow– gabapentin (vet prescribed!) to board the plane.
Despite my lucky brush with the storm and the ease with which the storage container facilitated my cross-country move, I recall this somewhat frantic packing episode with chagrin. Even as someone who is deeply invested in the considered design of well-made objects and tools, and appreciates the sentimentality of things that hold memory, I find it mortifying to contend with our attachment to material possessions. There’s something sickening and fascinating about humans “owning” or “possessing” so much stuff that we don’t want now, exactly, but we do want later. We don’t contend with it in the present moment, necessarily, but we do want to “keep” it in our possession.
I’ve mostly lived in roughly 120 square foot rooms in shared apartments and cooperatives, so I’ve been lucky to never acquire so much stuff as to need additional storage space. But I have friends who need unwieldy audio equipment for work, or bulky cameras and mics, that just don’t fit in their tiny but expensive rental apartments in LA. I remain intrigued by the anecdotal necessity of storage units, a need we’ve mass-produced as a culture that, on its face, is illogical if you step back to look at it. The prevalence of storage facilities tracks with our delusionally individualist culture, and the largest brand in the US is international self-storage company Public Storage.
By definition, the adjective “public” ranges in meaning from “exposed to general view;” “of, relating to, or affecting all the people or the whole area;” “devoted to general welfare;” “accessible to or shared by all members of the community.” Stylized in all-caps, the words “OPEN;” “WELL-KNOWN;” “PERCEPTIBLE;” “MATERIAL;” “POPULAR;” “SOCIAL;” “HUMANITARIAN” accompany these brief descriptions.1
By contrast, the noun “storage” is defined as “safekeeping,” “to stock against a future time,” accompanied by the words “LAY AWAY;” “ACCUMULATE;” “FURNISH;” “SUPPLY;” “HOLD;” “STOCK.”2 I’m always a bit surprised by the rage I feel when biking around and catching sight of signage for Public Storage. My indignation is overblown, but I find the juxtaposition of these two words exasperating, a pairing in which the two reciprocally dilute one another’s meaning.
The descriptions “material,” “perceptible,” and “social” denote a kind of presencing, a tangible and embodied investment in the realities of a given moment, a reverence for the irreplicability of temporal and physical context. For something to be public demands not only accessibility, but a kind of immediacy and specificity. Storage, premised on safeguarding against future possibilities or reserving something for later use, is exactly at odds with this. There is a placeless and unspecific quality to the word storage, which denotes merely a container for holding off against addressing something until some indeterminate future time.
The fixity of “storage,” a rigid container for potential future possibilities –for now, boxed away, out of sight and out of mind– contrasts so sharply with the unfixed freedom suggested by anything “public” –where access and unbounded movement allows for unexpected intersections and overlaps– that the phrase Public Storage has always struck me as oxymoronic. The slogan clearly intends to advertise the company’s storage units as universally accessible, and I find the false premise of the word public here exceptionally grating. Individual boxes of people’s private property, arrayed in a placeless grid of lines, occupying the otherwise usable and occupiable space of the city, cannot be characterized as public.
I didn’t know until this morning –months, or possibly years, into thinking about writing this piece on Public Storage – that the company itself, with its vivid orange branding and distinctive typeface, is headquartered in Glendale, California. The graphic format of this piece had already loosely arranged itself in my mind, centered on maps generated both by google/the internet, and by my personal impressions and interpretations of place from my bike. That this international self storage company is headquartered only a few miles from the neighborhood where I live is besides the point. It’s irrelevant to the observations I’m making where this company is centered in physical, literal meatspace. The specificity of place is rendered meaningless by the company’s ubiquity, by the fact that I could very easily have drawn a similar set of plans based in any of my home cities.
The sheer scale of their operation emphasizes this point. According to their own website,
Since opening our first self-storage facility in 1972, we've grown to become the largest owner and operator of self-storage facilities in the world. With thousands of locations across the U.S. and Europe, and more than 170 million net rentable square feet of real estate, we're also one of the largest landlords.3
REITs, or real estate investment trusts, like Public Storage, are companies that “own, operate, or finance income-generating real estate.” Profit is openly named as the sole purpose of this land, characterized as “income-generating.” There is no investment in placemaking, in stewardship of the land, in convening people, or in using the space for any kind of shared activity.
Regarding land stewardship in urban environments, I often come back to San Francisco politician Jackie Fielder’s casually commanding tweet from July 2020: “Good morning. Build social housing on golf courses.”4 This stark spatial commentary is a call to action that would reclaim privatized space for social good. Parks, green space, playgrounds, riverfront bike paths and running routes, are often at the center of our advocacy for what is needed in the city, to combat environmental racism resulting from histories of segregation and pollution. By contrast, Fielder’s pairing of social housing with golf courses calls to our attention that the broad categorization of green space in the city can purport a false image of publicness. Similar to Public Storage facilities that loudly declare themselves to be public with bold white font and bright orange signage, there is a flagrant dishonesty to blanketly associating green space with public good.
At best, a practice in public storage would follow the exemplary model of our last bastion of civic infrastructure invested in shared stewardship, the public library, where goods in storage are communally cared for, rotated regularly, shared equally, and remain accessible to everyone. As a culture, we are out of practice with shared stewardship. We’re practiced in hoarding possessions at the expense of a practice in collectivized care. The mundane manufacture of false meaning through such phrases as “public storage” is just one small bit of evidence that our use of language reproduces our values, habits, and cultural practices.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/public
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/storage
https://www1.publicstorage.com/our-story.html
https://twitter.com/sulagarcia/status/1288170234432585728