This is a weekly program with commentary on current issues.

The tan overstuffed sofa in the self-storage office has become what Crystal Valenzuela calls “a therapist’s couch”.

This is where customers sit and tell the young office manager about the parts of their lives they have had left behind in a StorQuest rental unit situated near the Riverside-Corona border.

They tell Crystal about their children’s photo albums, their kids’ bikes.

Crystal listens as they tell her about “the sheriff’s knock at their doors.” She listens as if she has welcomed them into her living room and invited them to sit a while on her couch.

I phoned Crystal’s office at random after I began noticing the fine print tucked into the reams of foreclosure ads: notices of storage-unit auctions. People who couldn’t pay the rent were losing their possessions.

We had a story about this late last year. Area auctioneers said the delinquent storage-unit business was up. As I made my calls, I got a slightly different take: Storage-unit auctions are normal, even in good times. But the storage business is really buzzing because units are filling up, not because their contents are being auctioned off.