The Detroit News has this story today: Michigan’s bad economy fuels boom in auction of storage units.

A snippet:

When Michael Watkins lost his automotive job last year, he needed his limited savings to pay for rent, groceries, child support and a storage unit filled with furniture and weights that the 35-year-old couldn’t cram into his apartment after a divorce.

But in the ensuing months before he found another job, the money ran thin, and Watkins had to let some things go by the wayside.

“It came down to eating and keeping the lights or paying some $600 for three months of back rent on my storage,” the Romulus resident said. “So I lost a couple thousand dollars in gym equipment through the auction process. It hurt, and in hindsight I should have just sold the stuff myself.”

I’ve talked about this situation before – Downsizing in financial crisis: should you get a storage unit? That post was based on one of the handouts at the Mortgage Solutions foreclosure crisis seminar held March 29 in Monroe.

About 15 years ago, a family I knew lost their home to foreclosure. About the same time, they had rented a storage unit. They failed to keep up with the rent on the storage unit and lost all the contents.

How did I learn about that situation? In the community where we lived in Ohio, it was customary for the storage unit companies to list in the newspaper the names of renters gone bad when auctions got scheduled.

When I saw their names in that notice, I couldn’t help but wonder what was in the storage unit. Family keepsakes that should have been taken to a relatives’ home? Furniture they needed for the next move? Stuff that could have been sold at a garage sale to keep at least a couple of bills paid on time?

There is a time and place for storage units, but that’s only when you know it’s a short-term need.

For example, my daughter has some of her college stuff in a storage unit that she and some friends are sharing for the summer in their college town. Given the gas prices, the girls didn’t want to haul more things back and forth to their hometowns than necessary. (I could not have fit anything else into our car during move-out at the end of the school year).

But when my family and I moved to Monroe, we were packing up the contents of a small rental house in Ohio. We waited about six weeks for a townhouse unit to be ready for move-in here in Monroe. The other housing we could afford locally at the time would have required either coin-operated laundry and / or a storage unit for some of our stuff, and I didn’t want to add either expense on top of already high rent for an unknown amount of time.

It was a smart decision to wait for a rental that had the space and utilities we needed. We lived in that townhouse for four years before we bought our own house.