I was really hoping this wasn’t a public poll. 
I live in a condo, without an exit directly outside – it’s a security building – so by definition the front door to my building is always locked.
When I’m away I always lock up. Not that I don’t trust the other people in my building it’s just that … ok, I don’t trust the other people in my building.
When I’m home alone, I generally lock the door out of habit, but quite often I forget. So I guess I trust the other people in my building a little bit.
Having been the target of an attempted home invasion before, yeah, pretty much.
Does living in a different place, even a different state change things? No, not at all.
Always.
We live in a decent area and I haven’t heard of any problems in our neighborhood, but I can’t even imagine not having all the doors locked at all times. Not doing it, to me, invites trouble (like forgetting they’re not locked and leaving, for example).
I’ve lived in urban or relatively dense surburban areas my whole life, so I’ve been taught to always lock doors since I was a small child. The habit has stayed with me.
Only when I’m not at home.
I assume you mean the outer door from the flat to the stair house? It falls closed on its own (that’s the way most of our locks are, so it’s easy to lock yourself out).
Additionally, there’s the outer door to the stair house, which is often open during the day time (because idiots leave it standing open) but closed at night.
I don’t lock the door at night, because if the proverbial fire happens, I want to get out (unless I die of smoke inhalation, even more likely). I also don’t lock during the daytime when I’m inside, because, well, I’d notice things going on.
I live in a middle-level (not posh, but not high-crime either) suburb of a rather quiet million-people city.
I usually lock the front door when we go to bed for the night. I don’t bother with the sliding glass door to the patio. Doesn’t really matter, as I live in a very rural area, with little crime, plus we have two dogs that will hear a squirrel fart half a mile away, much less someone attempting to enter my home without permission.
Same here. Except we have one key (that we can never find) that is used only on the rare occasion that we leave home for an extended (week or more) trip and decide to lock up.
If my house is robbed in the near future, I am blaming the OP. 
Can’t you just unlock the door if there’s a fire?
Valuable seconds during a confusion. Also, if I’m being woken in my sleep, I’m groggy enough anyway. With flames and smoke, it doesn’t take much for things to go completly wrong.
Do you guys have those locks on the inside that require keys? I could see not wanting to lock that in the case of fire.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen that in the States or not, but half the flats I had in Budapest had (in my opinion) a dangerous and effed up system in which to leave the building you required keys. For example, in my first apartment building, there were two or three locks to get out the door (which you can choose to leave unlocked if you wish–I only locked one and left the key in if I was inside), but then there was also a stairwell gate (which requires a key) and a front door gate (which required two keys). It always looked to me like a disaster waiting to happen. I actually did once lock myself in the stairwell when I fumbled with my keys and they fell down down in between the flights of stairs to the basement, past the locked iron gate. Were I trapped in a fire, I’d have to hope there was somebody else there with me to unlock that gate.
It’s not if it’s locked- it’s how locked it is.
Both my front & back door have a door handle lock, a dead bolt, and a slide lock. And I have a security alarm.
The back door usually stays triple locked because we seem to have a lot of random folk traipsing through the backyard (I live in a townhouse quad). The front door is typically double locked (handle/deadbolt). I may leave the slide unlocked if I think there’s a chance my boyfriend or bff will stop by because they can’t unlock that with their keys - it can only be unlocked from the inside.
I mostly only turn the alarm on when I’m sleeping or away from the house. However, to turn on the alarm, I have to be upstairs and able to exit the house in 80 seconds or less. So sometimes if I just need to run to the store or have to cart too much stuff out to my car, I’ll be lazy and not turn it on.
The next $200 extra bucks I have may go towards the purchase of a key fob for the alarm or I may just wait for the iphone app they keep promising will be available soon.
I feel very safe with my neighbors in my actual quad, but the quad beside ours is owned by a different property management company, and those people tend to be kind of sketchy, so I feel better being buttoned up tight.
At night, and when we are not at home. Occasionally if I’m running a fast errand that may involve having my hands full i also leave it unlocked. We have a home that requires you to enter through a fence gate to get to an interior door. This sets off the dogs.
Having lived in countries where people will actively try to kill, kidnap or rob an easy target, I operate on these lamentable principles:
- Not everyone outside your door wishes you well.
- People are often killed by random psycopaths who happen to get into their homes.
- Being rural does not negate either of the above, just lessens the posibility (see In Cold Blood, et al).
- I like to keep honest people honest.
When we leave the house, we drop the blinds, lock the doors, and turn on the alarm system.
We leave the front and back porch lights on at night.
We have a motion-activated floodlight near the garage.
When we’re home, the doors are locked.
My front door and back doors are always locked, as they are seldom used. the door to the garage is hardly ever locked and the garage door is usually open unless it is really cold.
We live in the country, maybe two miles from a town of less than 2500 people. While there is little crime the rational for not locking down the house, the barn, the machine shed, the shop and other outbuildings is that is if anyone was willing to go to the effort of coming out there to run a burglary no number of locks would keep them out and the damage done in the break-in would far exceed the value of anything that would be carried off.
When we lived in town all the houses on the block but ours were burglarized one summer afternoon in a quick snatch and grab operation. My wife was convinced that it was our excessively friendly but large and loud Labrador Retriever that scared off the burglars but I knew better. The perps were my clients. Even a back-country crook knows better than to rip off his own lawyer.
Almost never. I live out in the stick in a very low-crime area. Also, I figure based on my house keeping, anyone who ever broke in would look around and think: dammit, someone has already been here!
I lock the doors at night, but I leave them all open during the day when I’m at home. If I go out for a short trip within the neighbourhood (e.g. to the shops or library) I usually leave them unlocked too.
I’ve lived in Moab, Utah for 19 years and it was only two years ago that I even owned keys to my house.
We do, however, have quite a few Second Amendment enthusiasts.
I live way out in the sticks, I work at home, and Mr. S works second shift so I am often home alone during evening hours. I prefer to keep the doors locked, just to be on the safe side, because we do occasionally get reports of strings of “walk-in” burglaries. My office windows face the road, so I usually notice if someone is approaching the house in the usual manner, but if they were sneaking in from the back, I’d have no idea unless my two noisy dogs twigged to them. (Thanks guys!)
On the other hand, I did accidentally leave my purse on the front seat of my unlocked car overnight last night . . .
Doors are always locked when no one is home. Car doors are almost always locked when we are not in the car. Exceptions for locking house and car would be if we’re both home and constantly in and out.