Mrs. Stuffy and I were discussing this at the store last night. We live in what I guess you called a bedroom community or maybe an exurb. There is a small shopping center at the entrance to the neighborhood containing a chain grocer, chain video store, a couple of grab and go food joints etc. Otherwise it’s all houses, schools and parks, including a couple of walking trails. We, specifically, live on a cul-de-sac our house is the bottom of the bag. From the window nearest the street I can see the entire block with the exception of the neighbor to my immediate right. My backyard borders other back yards and the lines of sight are in yards any direction.
Despite all that my wife doesn’t feel safe unless all the doors and windows are always locked. This just doesn’t make sense to me and I wasn’t raised that way despite being raised in Detroit then Oakland. I’m used to doors being unlocked during the day. In furtherance of that, my Mom and Grandmother are 62 and 83 respectively. They live in a traditional neighborhood and they never lock their doors. I figure that chance of some random nut walking into my house is sufficiently rare as to be not worth contemplating.
My wife needless to say thinks we’re nuts and are flirting with disaster. I’m interested in your opinion of your own circumstances especially if you and your SO are at odds on the relative safety of your domicile.
Little bit of macho coming out here -
I’ve no problem with the house being buttoned up tight when I’m not there - lock everything and turn on the alarm. But when I’m home I feel totally safe.
I don’t freak out the kids with “Lock everything when I’m not home, your mother can’t protect you” or anything.
I live in a nice little neighborhood in a nice little small town, and I still have a monitored alarm system. Crime happens in good neighborhoods, too. I like knowing when I come home alone that there’s no one in there waiting for me. I like knowing that if he’s away, I will get some warning if someone tries to break in. And all doors and windows are locked if I’m home alone at night. In the daytime, my neighbors are all out and about, and I don’t worry (plus I have dogs).
I always lock the doors - I live in a decent neighborhood on the border of a nasty one, and I’ve had stuff stolen out of my yard and unwelcome knocks on the door at late hours. I do keep firearms for home defense and I do have a security system which is always turned on at night (and things like the glass break sensors are always on.) I feel quite safe having taken what I consider to be reasonable precautions, however.
I have a simple wooden door with a 60-second lock, and I still feel completely safe. Don’t know why, really.
This one time, my doorbell rang, and when I went to look through the observation-fisheye-thingymajig (no idea what the English word is, but you know what I’m talking about), something was blocking it, probably the guy’s hand. I didn’t open, of course, and I did contemplate ripping the door open, giving him a whack with my cane (90 cm of solid wood) and slamming the door shut again, but I didn’t. He didn’t ring a second time and I don’t know what he did next. I should have done something, and don’t know why I didn’t.
We didn’t lock the doors for a really long time, but then we were burgled so we got an alarm system. After about 10 years of that bullshit we decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. I feel pretty safe, though I do keep the door locked during the day while I’m working.
My husband won’t exercise with the blinds open and he kinda bitches me out for working with them open (I simply HAVE to). Something about being a sniper target. Oh those kids and their imaginations!
My sister wouldn’t let her daughter ride a bike because she thinks girls on bikes are stand-out targets for sexual predators. I laughed my ass off when I heard that. She finally bought her one…now that she’s almost old enough to drive.
My neighbourhood is a funny one. A few blocks to the north is the scariest stretch in my part of the city, and one of the very few places I don’t feel safe walking alone at night. A few more blocks to the south is a notoriously sketchy (but not actually all that unsafe) area, justifiably famous for hookers and drugs. Just to the west is a big industrial area that’s deserted at night, and I am surrounded by alleys that can often conceal all kinds of na’er-do-wells. However, my IMMEDIATE surroundings are single family homes filled with retired people or young families, or split into apartments for young professionals.
I always feel safe but I’m probably quite stupid to, as a single woman. I have never lived on a main floor, tho (i.e. always in apartments on the 2nd or 3rd floor), so windows have never been a concern, and there’s always been someone else’s door closer to the front door than mine.
I have a dog but he’s always crated when I am not home, and he is extremely friendly when I am; I hope that his protective instincts would kick in if necessary but I can’t be too sure. He looks frightening enough that I’m never the least bit nervous when I’m walking with him, even if it’s in the alleys or deserted industrial areas.
I guess I figure that if someone wants in badly enough, my deadbolt isn’t going to be sufficient to stop them. And as a renter, deadbolts are all I’m likely to get.
I don’t think feeling safe and locking up your dooors and windows are necessarily exclusive.
I feel very safe in my house even tho’ I live in what was a very bad neighborhood a few years ago. However, I do lock my windows and doors when sleeping or away from the house although they’re generally open when I’m home and awake. As a testiment to the former roughness of my neighborhood, my house used to have bars on all the windows and doors. I’ve removed them but I left them on my bedroom window so I can sleep with the window open and not feel unsafe. But I’m also a single woman who lives alone and feel it’s prudent to be cautious. I don’t worry about a random nut, I worry about a predator who looks for situations such as mine. I know the chances of being a target are very rare but not unheard of.
I’ve always felt really safe in my neighborhood. It’s just a little square-shaped thing with one entrance/exit road. I own a home here in the same neighborhood where I grew up. It’s very quiet, very friendly and very suburban.
When I was 18 my parents’ house was robbed while all of us were out, at a play at the high school, the next block over. It made me really, really scared. To the point where I couldn’t stay home alone overnight (this was in my 20s!!) I don’t know why I was so scared - not like anyone was hurt. Pretty much the fact that we always had 2 cars in the driveway and the night we got robbed, no cars, gave me the clue that the robbers were not trying to run into anyone at home.
Anyway, I started taking karate and got really confident. Something just clicked with me. I was able to move out of my parents house, into my own house and live alone.
Now I’m completely over it. I don’t lock my doors and I don’t have an alarm system. I have a dog but while she’s big, she’s not really the protective type.
I think for me I was not physically afraid of being harmed, or even robbed. But at my parents house there was stuff to PROTECT. All of my dad’s baseball cards (1950-1970) were stolen and so was my mom’s diamond ring. That was decades of memories and actual heirlooms gone. That was all we had that meant anything to me.
In my new house, all I have is “stuff.” Nothing meaningful. Nothing worth over $200. Since I’ve never worried about being shot or held up in my own home (no records of that happening ever in this neighborhood), I just don’t worry anymore.
I feel very safe at home. We do lock the doors at night, but we routinely have windows open, weather permitting, and I don’t lock the doors during the day. The worst thing we’ve ever had happen here was one night when some drunken college guys were having a party down the street (not our street, but the main avenue our neighborhood connects to) and someone banged on our door at midnight and ran away. Oh, and the idiot tipsy neighbor who thought it would be fun to set off fireworks in the empty lot near our house on the 4th of July–the dry, weedy empty lot. Yeah, good idea there, dude. Go away.
I have never worried particularly about anything worse, though. Yes, it could happen–and has, to others in the neighborhood (mostly a couple people who ran their cars to warm them up and came out to find them gone). But mostly it probably won’t.
Now, my BIL and SIL are very different and kind of interesting to me. They live in a residential neighborhood that is admittedly slightly less ‘nice’ than ours, but only just barely so. They know most of the neighbors and all. And yet they have a steel screen door and a security system, and the doors and windows are all locked at all times (on a nice evening, they’ll have the front door open and the steel door locked so as to let in fresh air, but that’s as good as it gets). They are far more paranoid than we are, and IMO with very little justification. If I lived there I would be more careful than I am here, but nowhere near the level of security they keep up. So they’re just kind of odd, IMO.
I grew up surrounded by farms, out in the middle of nowhere, yet only 40 miles outside of Manhattan. We never locked our doors or windows. Not when we were home, not when we went out. Never. And never had a problem.
Once I moved out and had kids of my own, I always locked the windows and doors of my place. It just made me feel a little safer.
In our home now both my husband and I are pretty insistent on making sure the doors and windows are shut and locked whenever we aren’t’ home and at night.
Our neighborhood isn’t a good one, but it’s not an awful one either. If I had to guess though, I’d say it is definitely one of the worst areas in Santa Rosa. (But we are kind of isolated in our condo complex.) The ghetto bird circles our immediate area about once a week, and I’ve seen police with shotguns running around more times than I care to remember. Oh, we were sitting around the house Saturday night when a loud noise started going off outside. I was certain for a second it was someone firing a machine gun. Turned out to be fireworks. Heh.
Our home was robbed last year, and I know I definitely did not feel safe or comfortable in my own home for several months after. Probably only in the last few months has it felt like home again.
Here’s one thing my husband does that I find adorable -
The little bodega a half mile from our house or so is a regular stop for cigarettes/beer/whatever. There are always at least a couple of prostitutes, gang bangers, drug dealers or vagrants milling about outside. Every single time we stop there, he locks me inside the car and then knocks on the door when he comes back. It just makes me giggle and makes me feel loved.
I (middle-aged female) live (alone) in a working-class neighborhood of a major city. I lock the doors when I’m not home during the day (unless I’m just running around the corner for 15 minutes) and at night, but not when I’m home and conscious. If I remember, I’ll lock – or at least close – the front door if I’m in the back yard. I leave windows open all the time during the summer.
We lock the doors and alarm when we are not home. Weekends my wife locks the door when she is home alone - even though our pooch Griss, would eat most folks that tried anything stupid like breaking into our home. We live in a nice coastal community with very little crime, but then so did the man in Chester, Connecticut, where two thugs followed his teenage daughters home, waited until 3 a.m. broke in, raped mom, daughters, killed them then beat him for his trouble.
Sorry but, you are never truly safe. If a sicko or psycho decided to target you, locks only keep the honest people out.
Upon edit, this is a grim post, but it’s raining in CT, and I’m a little blue.
I keep my doors locked when I am home. I don’t count on that stopping any one from entering my home but I do count it allowing time to properly arm myself to defend my wife and myself. I keep a loaded handgun in a gun vault that takes about 3 seconds to open. The neighborhood I live in is as safe as any in town but even they have had home invasions. Most have occured through locked doors.
Welive in a 500 acre forest at the end of a 1/2 mile gravel road with only one other house in sight. I lock the front door when we go out of town (although it will still open if you crank the handle) and throw a cardboard tube in the way of the sliding glass door (never put the lock on). I feel perfectly safe. There are a few volunteer security dogs about (they might lick you to death) and I doubt anyone wants to steal my lps or first edition sci fi paperbacks. There is only one key to the pickup so we leave it on the ignition so as not to lose it. I can’t imagine a life with locks and fear.
Pretty much the same here, except that I live with my daughter in a four-apartment duplex. My door is locked during the day when I’m not at home, and locked when I go to bed.
I actually feel much safer in an urban setting than out in the middle of nowhere. I have three other families IN my building, and neighbors within 20 feet on either side. There’s no way that my daughter or I could kick up much of a fuss without someone noticing.
I suppose that someone could break into my house during the day without anyone noticing, and steal all my stuff, which would be unfortunate, but I’m quite unconcerned about our personal safety.
Doors are always locked, unless we’re out in the yard. Windows are locked whenever they’re down, which is almost always at night and whenever we’re gone (at least gone for more than a quick trip to the store.) I live in a blue collar, middle class suburb, and I know there’s some crime, but I feel quite safe. I don’t see any reason to give opportunist anything to try for, though, and we have a lot of people who walk down the street all day long. Plus, I feel it would be irresponsible to leave the doors unlocked when I keep loaded handguns.
I feel perfectly safe. I do lock my door --and put the chain on it at bedtime (give or take slightly) and take the chain off only when I depart my apartment. I don’t worry about it when I am home and awake.
Now, I live on the groundfloor of a small apartment building in a medium size apartment complex. I almost never open my windows–have blinds open, yes, move the glass so that fresh air can get in, no. Once in a while I’ll open my windows. But I’m a whole lot more nervous about someone deciding to remove the screen and come in through the window than I am about someone coming in through the door. (No, I do not live in the kind of complex where one needs a key to get into the building).