In the shadows: Some homeless living in storage units

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Lift the rollaway gates on some South Florida storage facilities, and a secret life emerges.

The men and women huddled inside are not just storing old photo albums and family heirlooms. They’re living among them.

With nowhere else to go, these homeless have found temporary shelter in the one place that feels like home: the rented unit holding the last of their possessions.

For the Young family and their pet dog, “home” was a 10-by-15-foot unit at Uncle Bob’s Self Storage in Hollywood, Fla. A county away, Marty Tortorella and his drifter friends hid out on cold nights in a Public Storage facility in Lake Worth, Fla.

Illegal and risky, the unorthodox living arrangement is both comforting and frightening — with time spent dodging night managers, sleeping among reminders of a lost life and praying the secret hideout stays secret. It rarely does.

“If you’re like a ghost, you can maintain for quite a while,” Tortorella said. “And I was like a ghost.”

While the practice is not being tracked, law enforcement and social service officials who deal with the homeless say these are not isolated incidents.

The storage industry agrees it does happen. When the Sun Sentinel visited dozens of storage facilities over two recent months, the vast majority of managers and front desk workers said they know homeless people will try to live in their rented unit. Many are evicted.

“Sadly, we’re not social workers. Our hands are tied,” said Diane Piegza, vice president of corporate communications at Uncle Bob’s. “It’s not just against our policy, it’s against the law. You cannot live in a storage unit.”

‘We just found ourselves being there’

The transformation from storage unit to overnight hideout evolved gradually for the Youngs, homeless after the short sale closed Jan. 15 on their house on Northwest 98th Avenue in Pembroke Pines.

At first, Uncle Bob’s Self Storage was a convenient place to store baby photos, treasured trinkets and whatever else the family of five could cart out the door of the three-bedroom, two-bath house they shared for 16 years.

When Daphne Young signed the Uncle Bob’s rental agreement at the end of January, she said, she never expected to violate the stipulation that prohibited “any human to inhabit” the property.

“We kept looking for a place to stay, but all the shelters were full,” said Daphne, 52.

At first, the couple, their three adult sons and Bruno the dog spent their days riding around in a rattle-trap 2001 Mercury Sable — pillows stashed in the back window, sleeping bags on the floor. They slept in the car at parks, a Walmart or Memorial Hospital Pembroke across the street from Uncle Bob’s.

Every day, they’d visit the unit to retrieve clothes, thumb through a photo album and be close to their valuables.

“And then we just found ourselves being there,” Daphne said, “using their restroom like it was our restroom, and eating right there.”

The unit was a gift: the $186 rent for February covered by Operation Sacred Trust, a program to end homelessness among veterans. Her husband, Greg, 50, is a disabled vet who injured his back in a paratrooping exercise in 1982.

Once a medical assistant for a Broward County cardiologist, Daphne said she was laid off in 2011. Their three sons — ages 18, 20 and 22 — have not been able to find jobs, they say.

They say they all live on the $1,000 a month Greg gets in veterans and Social Security disability benefits. It barely pays for ride-around gas, occasional groceries and 49-cent McDonald’s hamburgers, eaten on the hood of the Sable in front of their unit.

For a while, they kept up the appearance of following the rules. They made sure the car was off the property after hours and tried to look busy when visiting the unit by day.

Slowly, they got bolder. The three sons began sleeping there, among the clutter of boxed-up memories. All taller than 6 feet, they couldn’t take another night folded up in the back of the Sable, they said.

On a typical night, Connor, the youngest at 18, laid down on a roll-up Memory Foam mattress thrown over a precarious pile of boxes with the family’s china, framed paintings, even his mother’s yellowing wedding gown. His brothers, Kyle, 20, and Adam, 22, slept on their late grandfather’s queen-sized mattress, saved from their old home in a fit of nostalgia.

By the daily 10 p.m. deadline to be off the property, the three would close the bright orange roll-down door on the unit, shutting themselves inside. On the other side, their parents adjusted the padlock so it looked secure but left the sliding bolt open, for emergencies — a tip from another squatting renter, they said.

A community of sorts

The sweltering heat, the sound of gnawing rats and the tempting aroma from a neighboring barbecue joint kept them awake most nights. There was no air conditioning, no light, no electrical outlets. Not even a fire alarm to summon help if needed.

That scared Daphne and Greg. After a few nervous nights, they started parking the car protectively in front of the unit at all hours of the night, with Bruno keeping watch from the back seat, barking at anyone who ventured too close.

“We’re not the only ones here,” Daphne said late one February night. “There are others here doing the same thing.”

Kyle said he’d try to block out the raised voices of a couple arguing in the unit on the other side of the thin metal wall. The Youngs, and other renters who spoke to the Sun Sentinel on condition of anonymity, also took notice of a man who drove his red truck through the gates every night right before the 10 p.m. deadline. He’d sleep in the truck in front of his unit, they said, then leave early the next morning.

Then there was the usual morning rush, when the Youngs took turns at the only public bathroom on the property, often waiting as others washed up at the sink or brushed their teeth.

“Nobody looked at each other too much. You let somebody go to the bathroom and gave them their space,” Daphne said. “Everybody was kind of respectful of the fact that, you know, we know you’re here, and we don’t want to blow your cover because this is all you have.”

In what passed as a community of sorts, they did what neighbors do — shared tips on evading detection and stayed out of one another’s business. They shared something else, too: a sense of doom. Because sooner or later, they knew they’d get caught, and risked losing what little they had left.

It wasn’t long before the Youngs got their first warning. A manager opened the unit door one night, Daphne said, and discovered the three sons sleeping inside. One more violation and they were out, they were told.

The family, though, made themselves more conspicuous by the day.

The second warning came just a week after the first, with an eviction notice that gave them 10 days, until Feb. 28, to gather up their things and get out.

Piegza, of Uncle Bob’s, called the Youngs’ predicament “heartbreaking” but said the company had no choice in ending their lease.

“Certainly, anyone who falls into that sort of situation, how can you not feel for them? It’s an awful situation,” she said. “But at the end of the day, to live in a storage unit goes above and beyond the contract. It’s not safe. It’s not sanitary.”

And it’s a serious liability hazard.

“There’s no climate control, no fire alarm,” Piegza said. “What worse thing can there be than something happening to a family because they were staying in a storage unit?”

‘We know it’s happening’

The homeless are hiding out in storage facilities “more often than you think, especially with families, because where do they go?” said Ezra Krieg, program director at the Senator Philip D. Lewis Center homeless resource facility in West Palm Beach.

Krieg said he knew of several clients who admitted to living in their storage rental, at least for a time. Most recently, it was a mother and her child.

Storage industry officials say rental squatting is not a widespread problem, though they know it lurks in the shadows.

Marc Smith, treasurer and national director of the Alexandria, Va.-based Self Storage Association trade group, called it an occasional reality some in the business dread.

“Unfortunately, in tough times, we find that people try to adapt. It’s so sad,” said Smith, president of Personal Mini Storage, based in Orlando. “It’s a terrible thing to have to kick someone out. People say, ‘Where am I supposed to go?’ I don’t know where they’re supposed to go, but they can’t stay here.”

Living in storage facilities violates Florida state law and local building codes. Cases are typically handled as a civil matter, with violators facing eviction and the potential loss of their stored possessions, according to Capt. Scott Russell of the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

Every once in a while, the occasional headline shines a light on the dangers behind the risk.

In February, Collier County deputies arrested a 44-year-old woman on child neglect charges after she was found living in a Naples-area storage unit with a 2-year-old boy, according to the Naples Daily News and other media reports. Paramedics discovered her passed out in the back of the unit, next to two empty bottles of vodka.

A month later, a New Jersey woman was sentenced to probation for child endangerment, a year after police found her living in a Ewing storage facility with her two boys, ages 5 and 10, according to NBC 4 New York.

Fires linked to overnight squatters have caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, destroying multiple units last month in Elkton, Md., and last year in DeLand, Fla., according to fire officials. Fortunately, no one was injured.

“We know it’s happening,” Russell said. “They try to go unnoticed, and they do that very well.”

Many times, he said, their secret is kept by building managers or bystanders who are reluctant to report them.

“People have a heart, so they’re not going to tell,” Russell said. “What’s the solution? To kick them out on the street? People think, at least they have a safe place to sleep, a roof over their heads. It’s a lot safer than living in your car or sleeping on the street.”

There are undeniable risks, though, “so the people involved have to weigh the balance,” he added.

A painful price

Tortorella, the drifter from Lake Worth, knew better than to take chances with the unit he rented at a Public Storage facility on Lake Worth Road. The 10-by-5-foot box, after all, held his most prized possession: his 2002 Harley Sportster.

After two years of homelessness, of spending most of his time hiding out in the dense woods of nearby John Prince Park, the rainy, cold nights got the better of him.

So a little more than a year ago, he started sleeping in his indoor, climate-controlled unit a short walk away. He stayed only when temperatures dropped to uncomfortably cold degrees, he said, and he knew how to melt into the background.

“I watched for the manager to leave,” said Tortorella, 58, an unemployed machinist. “I knew to shut the light, keep the door closed, not to peek out, to stay out of the view of the cameras. I’d go in late and leave early.”

Though hardly ideal, sharing space with his Harley, his radio and family mementos was oddly comforting.

“In desperation, you want to (be close to) your possessions,” he said.

His jacket sufficed as a pillow. His sleeping bag kept out the chill of the air conditioning, and he was able to make a bed out of an old futon cushion someone had discarded.

“All the guys only stay on cold nights,” said another homeless man at John Prince Park who asked to remain anonymous. “I slept in the hallway because my unit wasn’t big enough to sleep in.”

In the morning, before the gates reopened and a security guard showed up, the man said he’d make himself coffee using a portable pot and the unit’s working outlet.

“There was one dude, his partner was sleeping on the floor. He was in his (recliner), in his underwear, beer in his hand,” the unnamed man said, laughing. “It was like an apartment for them.”

Until they were all kicked out.

Tortorella’s wake-up call came with a loud knock on his unit door at 11:30 one night a few months ago. He said four men and a woman who appeared to work for Public Storage told him to leave immediately, giving him two days to return to pack up his belongings and vacate the $68-a-month unit.

Tortorella said he counted 13 others who were evicted from their Public Storage units in the same sweep.

Shawn Weidmann, chief operating officer of Public Storage, did not return repeated calls for comment.

The eviction came at a painful price for Tortorella. Unable to secure another unit in so little time, he had to leave behind his radio, DVD player, family memorabilia and the books he’d kept with him move after move. He walked away with little more than his Harley, a backpack of textbooks and some clothes.

“It was extremely traumatic,” he said. “You don’t know who it is knocking on your door. You’re always on edge, alone in the dark.”

Tortorella said he’d never take the chance again and, today, believes he won’t have to. On March 24, he earned his machinist certification through Palm Beach State College. And The Lord’s Place homeless assistance organization in West Palm Beach has given him a place to stay and is helping him land and prepare for job interviews.

Diana Stanley, CEO of The Lord’s Place, said those “who call a storage unit their home” aren’t always so willing to be helped.

“Unfortunately, sometimes people are not ready to let go of their possessions,” which is often required when moving into a homeless shelter or subsidized apartment, she said. “It’s the reminder of what used to be, and they have difficulty letting go.

“And then there are those who have animals they don’t want to give up,” she added. “That’s one of the things that breaks my heart the most.”

For the Youngs, it’s Bruno, the pet Havanese they rescued from a shelter two years ago. They’re not willing to part with him now. And after all they’ve been through, they’re not willing to split up the family by going to different shelters, Daphne said.

Without their makeshift “home” at Uncle Bob’s, the Youngs are back on the streets. They rented another unit at nearby Pembroke Pines Self Storage, but it’s smaller, inside the building on the fourth floor, with additional layers of security.

Rather than risk losing everything with another eviction, they’re back to living in the Sable, the pillows stuffed in the back window, with Bruno keeping watch.