She says in some cases, people save things because they think it would be wasteful to throw them away.

“I had a man who was a hoarder and he had a box of string in his closet—and the box was marked ‘String, too short to keep,’” she recalls. “Now what was in that box? String. Too short. To keep.”

And yet he was keeping it. “That’s the essence of hoarding because first of all they are embarrassed and they aren’t going to know when they’re going to need it … I asked him ‘What can you do with this?’ And he said, ‘Well, I suppose I could tie it together if I had to?’”

If he had to. That stuck with her. Something might happen, essentially, and these people feel like these things—this extra toilet paper, this box of string—might be the thing that saves them.

“Maybe they had a point where their income was way off or they didn’t have a job for a while,” Wilfong says, “and they thought, ‘I don’t know when I’m going to get a job again. I need to start keeping things back that I may need.’”

In his 1931 book The Epic of America, James Trunslow Adams talked of the American Dream, “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.”

Fuller, he said. For everyone.

So what does the American Dream look like today? How does Adams’ message translate to someone living in poverty?

Wolff says if she’d been asked that five years ago, she’d have said the American Dream means “to be rich and famous.” Today, though, she thinks it means a life free from worry.

“The more money you have, the better stuff you can have … the better your life will be,” Wolff says. “I’m still way below the poverty level, but I have a roof over my head, I have a place I can sleep every night. I have food and I have my kid. I would be happier if I had more—if I was able to provide better for [my son], but you know what? What I can provide is enough.”

Gail Steketee, co-author of the book Stuff: Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, says hoarding isn’t just an American issue—but it’s certainly seen very often here. “As a culture we have too much stuff. Period,” she says. We’ve got more stuff than ever before—some estimate the average American home has 300,000 things in it. A 2009 New York Times article on the self-storage boom in America noted that one out of every 10 American households rents a storage unit and that it’s now “physically possible that every American could stand—all at the same time—under the total canopy of self-storage roofing.”

Steketee says poverty and a tendency to hold onto material goods don’t necessarily equal hoarding. But in someone like Wolff’s situation, it could lead to more problems.

“People with hoarding issues are at much greater risk of losing their housing than someone without a hoarding problem,” she says, pointing toward pest infestations and cleanliness issues that can come from having too many things, problems that a landlord might see as grounds for eviction. “So again we’ve got a little bit of chicken and egg problem—poverty goes along with that loss of housing.”