Homeless Girl Secretly Lived in a Storage Unit for 2 Years — And Turned It Into a Real Apartment 

Homeless Girl Secretly Lived in a Storage Unit for 2 Years — And Turned It Into a Real Apartment 

Most people who drove past the storage facility on NE Sandy Boulevard never looked twice at it. It sat behind a gas station and a tire place, a long low building with orange roll doors and a keypad at the gate. The kind of place you go to drop off your grandmother’s furniture and forget about it for 3 years. Nobody lives there.

 That’s what most people assume. Della Marsh lived there for 26 months. After she was 22 when she moved in. Not by choice, not as some experiment, not as content. She moved in because she had run out of every other option she could name. And this one still had a roof. Here’s what most people get wrong about homelessness in Portland, or really in any mid-size American city with a visible street population.

 The image is a tent, a bridge, a shopping cart. That’s the version that gets photographed and posted and talked about on the news. What doesn’t get talked about is the version that looks like nothing from the outside. The version with a padlock and a unit number and a keypad code nobody else knows. Della grew up in Medford, Oregon, southern part of the state, high desert edge, the kind of town where you either leave or you don’t.

 Her mom worked dispatch for a trucking company. Her dad had been gone since she was 11. She had a younger brother named Cal who was 9 years old when Della turned 18 and started figuring out what came next. What came next was community college in Eugene which she paid for mostly with a Pell Grant and a job at a sandwich shop on 13th. She did 2 years of that.

 Classes in the morning, closing shifts at night. And then the shop closed, and the grant got complicated, and the housing she’d been splitting with three other girls fell apart because one of them stopped paying and the landlord kept the whole deposit. Della moved back to Medford for 8 months. That didn’t work either.

 She ended up in Portland at 21. A friend had a couch. The couch lasted 6 weeks before the friend’s situation changed, and Della was back to looking. She had a job by then. Warehouse work out in Troutdale, early shifts, decent hourly rate, but first, last, and deposit in Portland in 2022 was not a warehouse rate, not even close.

 She looked at rooms, she looked at shared houses, she sat in a parking lot one afternoon and did the math three different times and got the same answer every time. She couldn’t make it work. The storage unit was $89 a month. She’d rented it originally to keep her stuff somewhere while she was couch surfing. A mattress, two boxes of clothes, a plastic bin of books she couldn’t let go of.

 She had a locker at work for the daily stuff. The unit was just storage until the night she showed up at 11:00 with nowhere to sleep and sat down on the mattress and didn’t leave. The first problem was the gate. The facility had a keypad entry that locked at 10:00 p.m. and opened at 6:00 a.m. That was the access window. Well, she worked it backward.

 She got home from her shift by 9:45 on good nights and she left every morning before 6:30. On overtime days it didn’t work and she’d sleep in her car, which she’d bought for $2,200 cash that first winter. Some nights the car was the backup plan. The unit was the plan. The second problem was temperature. Storage units are not insulated.

 In Portland that matters from November through March, sometimes into April. Her unit was 10 by 15 ft with a concrete floor and a metal roll door that let in cold air at the base. The first winter she slept in everything she owned. Thermals, a hoodie, a sleeping bag rated to 20°. A wool blanket on top of that. She’d wake up and her breath would hang in the air.

 She put a foam mat under the sleeping bag to block the floor cold. That helped more than anything else she tried. The heating problem took her 4 months to solve. Not a space heater. She’d looked into that and the fire risk in an enclosed metal unit was real and she wasn’t going to burn everything she had.

 What she found a heated mattress pad, battery-powered, charged during the day from an outlet she’d run a cord to. The facility had exterior outlets for people loading and unloading. And she’d charge everything during the day while she was at work, run the heated pad at night. It cost her $67 from a liquidation store on Powell. That second winter was different.

 The light situation came next. No windows. The roll door had a half-inch gap at the bottom that let in ambient light during the day, but not enough to do anything by. She had a headlamp for the first few months. Then she found that clip-on LED panels, the kind used for camping, gave better light spread without drawing power from a source she didn’t have reliable access to.

 She kept three of them charged and rotated them. Her unit had one outlet near the back wall, which she discovered existed in her second week. A previous tenant had left a long extension cord coiled in the corner. She still has that cord. Showering was the question she got asked most later when she started talking about this. The answer is that it was a problem she solved in three different ways across 2 years, and none of them were perfect.

The first was a gym membership, Planet Fitness, $10 a month, which she kept the entire time. She went before or after every shift, showered there, kept her toiletries in a bag in her car. The second was a community center on Burnside that had public showers available on weekday mornings for a suggested donation.

 She used that when the gym was out of her route. The third was a camping shower bag, a black solar-heated bag she’d hang in the unit for a few hours on warm days and use in the evenings. That was summer only and took some creative problem-solving with drainage, which she’s declined to explain in detail, and it’s fair enough. Food was actually the easiest part.

 The warehouse job had a breakroom with a microwave and a refrigerator. She kept food there. Breakfast and lunch happened at work. Dinner she made cold. Sandwiches, things from cans she’d open and eat direct, peanut butter and crackers and fruit. She had a small cooler in the unit for things that needed to stay cool.

Ice from the gas station next door. She spent about $40 a week on food, sometimes less. The address problem she didn’t solve for 9 months. You need an address for almost everything. Bank account, employer records, any kind of ID renewal, mail. She used a friend’s address in Northeast Portland for the first stretch.

 The friend knew she was in a weird situation and didn’t ask questions. Eventually, she found a mail service on Burnside that gave you a real street address for a monthly fee. Not a PO box, an address that looked like an apartment number. She used that for the last 14 months. It cost her $22 a month. What Della didn’t expect was how the space itself started to change.

 Where she’d moved in with a mattress and two boxes. By month three, she had the foam mat and the LED panels and the extension cord running to a small charging station she’d organized with Velcro cable ties. By month six, she’d built a shelving unit from lumber she’d found at a ReStore on SE Powell, paid $14 for the pieces, cut them to fit, built it against the back wall.

 She kept her clothes folded on it. She put a small mirror on the side wall. She had a little rug from a Goodwill on Barber, $6, the good thick kind that covered a patch of the concrete near her sleeping area. By the end of the first year, the unit looked like something, not an apartment. She’s clear about that.

 It was still a concrete box with a metal door, but it was organized. It was hers. She knew where everything was. She knew exactly how to make every inch of it work, and she started doing things she hadn’t expected to do. She bought a little plant, a pothos, because she read they survive almost anything. She kept a notebook where she wrote down what she’d spent each week and what she’d saved.

She put up two photos on the wall with pushpins, one of Cal and one of a coastline she’d visited once on a trip she’d taken with her mom when she was 14. The money accumulation was real. She was spending $89 on rent plus gym, plus mail service, plus food. Her total monthly overhead at her lowest was $312.

 Her take-home from the warehouse job working full-time was around $2,100 a month after taxes. That meant she was saving over $1,700 a month. Not every month. There were car repairs. There were months she worked less. There were things that broke or needed replacing. But the saving was real in a way it had never been before.

By month 18, she had $18,000 in her bank account. That number felt impossible to her. She’d never had more than $400 in her account at one time before this. She’d grown up in a house where money was something you were always short of, always waiting for, always explaining why you didn’t have it.

 And here she was in a storage unit with $18,000 saved because her rent was $89. The plan changed shape as that number grew. At first, she told herself she was saving for first, last, and deposit. That had been the original math. Get enough to actually rent a place, get out of the unit, get back to normal. But normal, as she understood it from the outside, cost her $1,400 to $1,600 a month minimum in Portland.

 A room in a shared house or a studio if she was lucky. And then all the money she’d saved would be going back to the same system that had kicked her out in the first place. She started looking at it differently somewhere around month 14. She’d been reading. She had a library card. She went to the Multnomah County Library on Sundays.

 It was warm and nobody bothered her and she could stay for hours. She read about housing costs. She read about people who’d bought property young. She read about RVs and land and tiny houses and all the alternative structures people use when the standard path doesn’t fit. And then she found a thread online about people who had saved aggressively while living in unconventional situations and bought land outright. She didn’t buy land.

 What she bought, eventually, was a used travel trailer, a 24-ft Airstream from 1991 that needed work for $8,500 cash from a guy in Gresham who’d had it sitting in his driveway for 2 years. Uh she spent $3,200 on repairs over 6 months. Mostly, she learned to do the repairs herself, watching videos, buying parts, doing the work on weekends in the parking lot of the facility where she’d rented her unit.

 By the time she moved into the trailer, she still had $9,000 in savings. The trailer was parked on a small lot she rented from a woman in Troutdale who had some extra land and didn’t mind the arrangement. $275 a month for the space, water hookup, electrical. That’s where Della is now. The storage unit story didn’t come out because she told it.

 It came out because her coworker noticed she never seemed stressed about money the way everyone else did, never talked about her apartment, always looked like she slept okay, and eventually just asked. Della told her. The coworker told someone. Then more people asked. She’s not saying everyone should do what she did. She’s specifically not saying that.

Two winters in an uninsulated concrete box is not a plan she’d recommend to anyone who had other options. Some nights, it was 38° inside that unit. Her she got sick twice, real sick, the kind where you’re lying on a mattress wondering if this was a terrible mistake. She missed a cousin’s wedding because she couldn’t explain where she lived.

She spent holidays alone in that space because the alternative was explaining the space to people she didn’t want to explain it to. But she also wants to say what she actually built in there, but she built a discipline she didn’t have before. Not because she wanted to, but because the situation left no room for waste.

 Every dollar had to mean something because there were very few dollars that could be thrown away without consequences. She built a knowledge of how to make small spaces work. Insulation, light, heat, storage, all of it solved in sequence because the problems showed up in sequence. She built a tolerance for discomfort that she wasn’t sure she had.

 And she found out she had more of it than she thought. The Airstream has a real bed, a real kitchen with a propane stove. A small bathroom that works. She has hot water. She has a heater that runs on electricity and makes the whole space warm in under 10 minutes. She has curtains on the windows. She has the pothos plant, which is enormous now, trailing across the entire back wall.

 She has the rug from Goodwill. She brought it with her. She is 24 years old. She has no debt. She has money in savings and she owns a trailer outright. That’s not where this was headed when she sat down on that mattress at 11:00 on a Tuesday night in a storage unit in Portland and figured she’d sleep there just this once.

 It is worth saying clearly, this didn’t fix everything. The storage unit didn’t fix her relationship with her mom, which is still complicated. It didn’t fix the fact that affordable housing in Portland is a structural problem that one person’s ingenuity cannot solve. It didn’t make the cold less cold or the loneliness less real.

 The days she came home from a long shift, opened the roll door, sat down on the mattress in the dark, and felt the full weight of what her life looked like from the outside, those days happened more than she’d like to admit. What it did was give her 2 years to accumulate something in a system that was not designed to let her accumulate anything.

 That’s what she wants people to understand. Not that living in a storage unit is a strategy, but that the gap between what she could afford and what housing cost was real, and she found the one place in that gap that fit. And she used it until she’d built enough ground under her feet to stand somewhere else. Della still drives past the facility sometimes on her way to work.

Same orange doors. Same keypad. She knows the code still works. She checked once about 3 months after she left just to see. It did. She’s not going back, but she doesn’t feel bad about what happened in there. That’s the part she didn’t expect. She thought she’d want to forget it. She doesn’t.

 There’s something that’s hard to explain about building a life in 150 square feet that nobody knows about. Nobody’s opinion of the space matters because nobody knows the space exists. You make every decision alone. You solve every problem alone. You are the only person who knows what you did to stay warm that first winter, what you rigged up for light, how you organize the shelves, how you got the papasan to stop drooping. It was entirely hers.

Whatever its limitations, it was entirely completely hers. She keeps the photo of the coastline. It’s on the wall of the Airstream now. Same pushpin. Little hole in the corner from where it’s been moved twice. Cal is 12 now. She’s saving to take him somewhere he’s never been.