Yeah, we’re good friend with our neighbors on either side, as well as across the street and a few houses up the road. Three of us households have exchanged keys for “Emergency Do Walking Duty”.
Because if someone at their house found your key they’d know which house it belonged to?
It’s not like the keys to our neighbor’s houses are labeled with a name or address. The one with the orange plastic cover is for one neighbor, the one with the purple thingy shaped like a paw print is the other neighbor’s. Ya think anyone hanging out in my house is going to say “A-ha!” and run across the road to break in? They won’t know what the key is for. The key could belong to anything: our shed, the garage, my MIL’s garage, my mom’s front door, my buddy’s cottage… The possibilities are vast.
It’s not quite that bad, not in the small suburban town I live in. To be clear: There is absolutely racism, but it’s a)mainly directed towards blacks and b)mostly downtown. Where I live, I am definitely an outlier and different, and occasionally get some…how would you best say it? silent racism, I guess is the best phrase, but the town itself is fairly diverse and I am as american as they come, these days. People don’t generally guess I am Indian and when they do, I am subject to some of the dubious advantages of the other kind of discrimination - i.e., the commonly-held belief that Asians are all well-mannered and hard-working and don’t commit crimes (HA!).
I have had authorites come to my home. But there is SUCH a vast difference between having them come to your house because you need something, and between having them come to your house because they wonder if you might be complicit in a crime.
But all that aside, I have never invited a cop into my home or anything like that. I wouldn’t be hostile or anything, but I have never done anything bad
Yeah, it’s not a problem. Our neighbor with the pawprint key thing, had a break-in while she was out of town. The cops asked who else had a key. We were the closest, so the cops showed up at our door. We were never under suspicion, they wanted our help checking things out and then securing the place again.
Then you ask them not to. I’m quite sure that the neighbors across the way have our key listed with our dog’s name. So unless their unscrupulous visitor knows what the label “Fang” means, and where Fang* might be found, it’s still not particularly helpful to a thief who is targeting homes in the area.
Besides that, I’ve come to realize that most of the people I find decent enough to be my friends, also tend to have decent people as friends themselves. So I don’t really think that they have scumbags, rummaging through their drawers looking for keys that may or may not be identifiable enough for illicit use.
A couple of my neighbors have the key to my condo; I have keys to theirs as well. Also, my cleaning lady has a key.
It’s come in handy a few times. I’ve never been locked out or anything, but I have gotten calls from my neighbor, for example, asking if I could check to make sure she unplugged her curling iron as she was at the airport leaving for a business trip. Little stuff like that makes life easier, puts people’s mind at ease.
Also, I’ve had a neighbor want to borrow an egg or a cup of sugar or something when I wasn’t home. Call me on my cell and I say sure, grab it yourself.
If I didn’t trust them, obviously they wouldn’t have keys and they wouldn’t be my friends. It’s nice to be friends with your neighbors.
I trust my neighbor across the street with a key, and my next door neighbor with the code to the garage (and the interior door stays unlocked). It’s a decent neighborhood, and my neighbors are great. If I weren’t able to trust my neighbors, that’d be kind of bad, since I spend as much or more time on the road as in my actual house.
Professional burglars are pretty quick about getting in and out, but they’re not common now-a-days. Most house invastions are by non-professionals looking to trade some merchandise for some cash to get a quick drug fix.
Those people are apt just to smash a window and run in and out.
I always assumed that the key to someone else’s house was always on your personal key ring, which you would keep on your person at all times (or at least within arms reach.) The idea that someone would just leave your key out and leave the house without it seems odd to me.
As the old saying goes ‘Locks only keep out honest people’. A few people have a key to my house, and I have keys to a couple of friends’ places too. I also keep a key in the shed in a lock box that a real estate agent left behind when I bought the house. The lock box key is handy if I do something stupid like lock myself out or I need to ask my neighbour to check on something for me. If I need to I can change the code so my neighbour can no longer access the key, but I don’t see that happening.
I think when people exchange keys with neighbors, they are talking about friends of theirs who are also neighbors, not just people who happen to live next door. When talking to a third party, they will describe that friend as a neighbor, to give the context of the relationship, but that isn’t all the relationship is. It’s just that if a person has 5 close friends/family, the one you are most likely to swap keys with is the one that lives the closest. The relationship didn’t start with key-swapping.
That said, 1) it’s really, really easy to crow-bar open a door. and 2) if a neighbor had a key, it’d be pretty foolish to use it. Better to just crow-bar your door open.
In Dubai we simply never locked our door so anybody could come in to check on things if we were away on holiday. None of our neighbors locked their doors either… and all the cars in the driveways had the keys in the ignition. Best place I ever lived other than the small town at Lake Tahoe where I grew up.