Clean Sweep

The Discovery Channel was once devoted to interesting documentaries and other informative shows. It has since split off into about a dozen other channels, which all seem to show either homes or people being made-over. These bore me, but there is one that has become a treasured indulgence: Clean Sweep.
This is superb television. If you’ve never seen the show, here’s the gist: a family appeals to the program to come help them reconstitute one or two rooms of their house that have become overrun with junk (one suspects that these incorrigible families have more than two rooms that need help). The Clean Sweep people arrive, make fun of the family for being so slovenly, then proceed to tear everything out of the rooms and spread them out on the lawn. The couple must sort their garbage into one of three piles: keep, toss, or sell. Then the real fun begins. One of the hosts, Peter Walsh, goes through the junk with the family piece-by-piece and chastises them when they want to keep some useless piece of crap. On the very best episodes, he can make them cry.
The rest of the show is the usually boring stuff about decorating, but the purge in the middle is the best part. These middle-class couples are directly confronted with their sick, hoarding tendencies and the awful effects they have on their ability to simply live in their homes. It feels good to watch the rooms be put in order and the offenders to come off with a light browbeating. But one also has the uneasy feeling that this is too little. Has Mr. Walsh treated a symptom or the disease? What’s to prevent them from using all of their new space to store more, newer junk? And how many countless homes across the country suffer from this agonizing condition of over-accumulation?

Hopefully, not everyone is quite so bad as the families on Clean Sweep, but I think it’s safe to say that many if not most households have too much unused crap, even to the point of making those houses dysfunctional. For data on this, several UCLA anthropologists are studying 32 middle-class families and how they inhabit their spaces (hat tip: Matthew Kahn). They have found that:

Despite the fact that contemporary Americans now control the largest amount of private space per person in the history of urban civilization, the team documented what Arnold calls “a storage crisis” among the first 24 of 32 families studied . . .
“We found items blocking driveways, cluttering backyard corners and spilling out of garages,” said Ursula Lang, an architect in Berkeley, Calif., and a study co-author.
The trend is fueling an “identity crisis” for the region’s garages, which rapidly are being converted into multipurpose storage spaces for household goods or people, “pushing cars once and for all out to the driveways and streets,” the study warned.
“Rarely do cars see the inside of the garage,” Arnold noted.

Of course, this is a limited sample size (and in LA), but it has the ring of truth, no? And the kicker is that all of this junk is apparently useless:

Ironically, much of the garage-stored material goes unused. Half of the families never even visited the garage spaces during the study, and more than half of those who did spent 10 minutes or less among the possessions sequestered at such a considerable trade-off.

And this is in the garage — not only is it right there, but one has an obvious alternative use for that space. How much more worthless must storage facilities be? (I once heard that one in ten Americans rent storage space.)
This is reminiscent of some sort of psychological trick, like over-eating. Conventional wisdom tells us our bodies are hardwired to store up calories for when times are lean. Are we also programmed to hoard? I doubt it, or else our cathartic purges wouldn’t feel so good. Andrew Postman wrote in Real Simple Magazine two years ago about clearing out his Brooklyn brownstone’s basement. He concludes, “When you’re accumulating, you can’t imagine throwing stuff out; when you’re throwing stuff out, you can’t imagine how you accumulated.”