Oakland, CA University Storage

When you’re lucky enough to attend a university in Oakland, you know you’ll need a lot of storage space.  Although college students work hard, they generally play harder.  If you’re moving to Oakland for school, you’ll be bringing more than just your books.  There’s so much to do in the city and its surrounding areas, so you’ll need a storage unit to accommodate the things necessary for your extracurricular and recreational activities.  And of course, you’ll need room for stuff for school too.

Scary Stuff

Let’s start with one of the most important things to consider when finding a storage facility in the area—security.  Oakland has an overwhelmingly high crime rate.  It’s safer than one percent of the cities in the U.S. and has an annual property crime of 24,944.  Universities are generally pretty safe, but you don’t want to risk keeping your valuables in your dorm room if there’s a chance they will be stolen.  On campus housing generally doesn't have much security, especially when it comes to protecting property.  Look for a storage facility that offers high security.  What we mean by that is a facility that offers 24-hour video surveillance, gated and well lit grounds, and on site managers.  You’ll be able to find places that offer higher security than that as well, but those are just the basics that we would recommend you have.  The last thing you want is your artwork being stolen in the middle of the night.

What Students are Storing

The University of California, Berkeley is just 5.5 miles north of the heart of the Oakland.  The university spans across 1,232 acres, has an undergraduate enrollment of 27,126 students and a graduate enrollment of 10,455.  That’s almost 40,000 students competing for storage units!  Not to mention they also have over 1,000 student organizations on campus.  UC Berkeley is not known to be a commuter school, so most of the students that attend the university live on or around campus.  It’s the number one public university and ranked third globally, so there are people from all over the world attending its programs.  Now if you consider everything we just told you, you’ll see that this massive student population is bound to take over all of Oakland’s 30 storage facilities.

A typical dorm room is about 114 square feet in size, and there are usually two to three students sharing a room.  If you ask us, the only things the average student can probably bring to college with him/her are some clothes and a few books.  The students at UC Berkeley are heavily involved in extracurricular activities that generally require extra stuff.  The thing that really caught our interest was the school’s hang gliding club.  All of those students have got to be putting their hang gliding equipment in storage units; those things are virtually impossible to fit into a dorm room.  UC Berkeley is also just over the San Francisco Bay, meaning that many students do a lot of biking, surfing, and other water sports that require some heavy duty equipment.  Even if students that attend this school pack light, they are so heavily involved in these recreational activities that they absolutely need storage units to store their things.

Storage Perks for Students

If you’re a student in need of a storage unit, and you attend UC Berkeley or any of the other 15 colleges in Oakland, consider storing your things at Central Self Storage or Berkeley Self Storage.  Both of these facilities are within two miles of campus and often deal with the surrounding student population, so they’ll know exactly what you’ll need.  If you feel like you can’t afford storage (trust us, you probably can), then ask about student discounts, back to school specials, or sharing a unit with a friend.

Also be sure to ask about month-to-month leases.  Most storage facilities offer them, which is great for when you go to study abroad or only want to leave your things in storage while you’re home for the summer.  And lastly, you’ll want a storage facility that offers 24-hour access to your unit.  Summer nights in Oakland are really nice, so it’s nice to know that you can grab your surfboard and catch some waves after a hard night of studying.