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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what country do you live I that you feel comfortable keeping you door and car unlocked? I've lived I the US and Germany and wouldn't have felt comfortable doing that in either place.

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Countries are not granular enough to use for this sort of thing. I've lived in several places in the US where unlocked doors were the norm, and then in several places where it would be a bad idea if you want to keep your things.

This is an embarrassing story, but one time I left my car running outside a coffee shop while I had coffee with a prospective employer for about an hour. When I got to my car it was no longer running but it was blisteringly hot because I had left the heat blasting, and there was a note on the dash that said "I turned your car off, I hope that's ok, your keys are in the console". So yeah, sometimes and in some places stuff doesn't get stolen when it could.

I have relatives in the rural Dakotas who don't really need to lock anything up.

I went to college in Atlanta, where leaving anything slightly valuable inside your vehicle would lead to a smashed window. So I've developed a lifelong paranoia about never leaving valuable items in sight in a locked car.

Also, HN crew if someone is going to rob your house they don't just try to enter in a locked door. The robber is going to knock, if you answer, make up some story how they are looking for Alice & Bob, and go on their way. If nobody answers, then they try to see if your doors are locked. I used to frequently get strangers "looking for someone" at my door in Atlanta, too. Few things are scarier than hearing a knock at the door when you are in bed, ignoring it, then hearing them try to open your door.

May I ask where you lived in Atlanta? I'm attending Tech right now and chose to live outside the city for safety reasons - in Dunwoody to be precise. I never knew it was that bad though.

I guess the long commute is worth it.

I went to Tech too. This was all > 8 years ago though. Staying on/near campus you are much better off, in the sense that access to the building is more restricted and people are going to notice someone sketchy in the hallway. But even on campus cars were frequently robbed, especially at night when I was there. I remember seeing a guy with a backpack full of LCD monitors getting arrested outside the College of Computing once. And bikes were stolen left and right, I lost one.

I once did a Habitat for Humanity build out the Bankhead (not Buckhead, big difference) highway. The had to have Atlanta PD watch the lot DURING THE DAY because multiple cars had been stolen from Habitat Volunteers. I still think that was crazy cars were stolen that brazenly in broad daylight.

I don't have a pulse how things are these days. But don't get scared off by these stories, there are lots of good things about living in the city too. Go Jackets. :)

Yeah, I heard that things are much better than they were back then. I guess I'll reconsider once my lease is finished. The good thing is that MARTA is pretty good and on-time usually from what I saw.

What did you study btw?

Upper-middle-class low-density areas are great for this. Your neighbors have too much to lose to steal anything, and it's too far to bother for out-of-towners.

The epitome of this is most of Switzerland. I went on a Tinder date with a girl recently whose apartment door did not even have a lock.

I wouldn't feel exactly comfortable doing that anywhere I've lived since I've began urban living, but here is a fun story (in the U.S, in a high crime city, but a lower crime area):

Before I moved into my second college apartment, the previous tenants warned that they got robbed a few times, and then learned never to open the blinds, and didn't have a problem after that. We therefore never opened the blinds. We pretty quickly broke off a key in the lock and ended up leaving it unlocked except when everyone was gone for multiple days (I won't bother explaining how this worked, or why we didn't get it fixed for a year.)

So our door was always unlocked, but since you couldn't see inside, theft was never the goal of the folks who wandered in. It was always those who were friends and customers of other people in the building who were told they could hang out with us until their friends got back from class or those who had to use the bathroom late at night.

One of my roommates was up until 4 am in the living room every night, and one time someone wandered in while no one was there, and left a note thanking us for letting them use the bathroom, but nothing was ever taken except xbox controllers, and we thought we knew the culprit.

This is an entirely normal thing to do if you live in an area that doesn't have a semi-permanent criminal underclass.

It's not even really a poverty issue - there are places where people are poor as churchmice, but the social stigma around theft is strong enough to keep people in line.

I spent a semester abroad in New Zealand and there were people there that left their doors unlocked. Similarly, in college a lot of my classmates left their doors unlocked even though the college administration repeatedly told us not to.

I think it's a density thing. In a small town, there's nobody to steal from you, and even if there was you'd eventually figure out who it was since everybody knows everyone. In a big city, someone can be in and out without you ever knowing, and you would never find them again. Indeed, most of the city residents I met in NZ still locked their doors (the people mentioned above were in smaller villages), while when my family went on vacation to a rural vacation home (in the US) my mom felt comfortable enough to leave the back door unlocked.

I lived in Atherton, CA for a while (granted, one of the richest and safest [1] ZIP codes in the US) and we never locked our house. In fact, I did not even have keys!

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/police-blotter-reports-f...

Off-topic,

I was once walking through Atherton and a police officer stopped me to make sure I wasn't doing anything suspicious. I suppose the number of "walking while white" infractions a community tallies might be a good (if unfortunate) indication of how wealthy they really are.

The same police officer later bought me a coffee for no particular reason. What a country.

Even more off-topic, here's something I don't understand:

- Cheapest home for sale in Atherton on Zillow is listed for $3.2 million

- The public schools shown to be in the same area as this house have unbelievably low scores (as measured by GreatSchools.org):

-- Selby Lane Elementary (assigned) .... 4/10

-- Garfield Elementary ..................2/10

What gives?

The wealthy people may send their kids to private schools. The public schools may have students from working class families in adjacent areas in the same school district.

I wonder if there is a certain level of wealth where school test scores aren't a worry anymore.

Part of Atherton is in the Menlo Park School District and part of it is in the Redwood City School District. The former is considered to be much better than the latter.

There is a lot of places where you can get away with it even in dense area of the US and Germany.

There is some social engineering going on there. If you live in an area where everybody locks his door and don't have a huge problem (like bands of bored teens trying every house, or lots of junkies, ...) the chances are very small that anyone would try to open your door, and if they do, they most likely come prepared. I remember that in my previous flat in the center of London, we left the kitchen window opened for years without even realising it. It would have been trivial to break into our place, but nobody cared. They entered 2 times over the same period at my neighbour place, likely because they saw something they wanted to steal through the window.

I come from a small town, small enough to yell across and we're perfectly safe leaving our doors unlocked. Home invasions and break ins are unheard of entirely, in the last 30 years at least. Similar behavior in surrounding towns with slightly larger populations.

I lived in a small, ostensibly safe town in Sweden, but people would come in from outside to violate the trust the people had. You need to be good friends with your neighbor so they can confront or report any suspicious outsiders.

my parents live in an affluent southern california suburb and still do this all the time. when i visit i just walk in the front door.

in most suburban places you can also leave the garage door open all day long just fine.

it's primarily dense cities that are the issue. just like online, when there's transience and anonymity, there's a high incentive for people to behave poorly.

>when there's transience and anonymity, there's a high incentive for people to behave poorly

Sometimes people tend to behave even more poorly if there is no anonymity. This happens when they think that they are morally right in an important area although they are totally wrong. Many racist "this needs to be said" comments are written using real names.

I don't lock up unless I'll be away for several days, I know many of my neighbors don't either; I live in the outskirts of Copenhagen and it's not even in one of the "fancy" areas.

Not him, but I live in a little village in Bavaria. My mother frequently leaves the doors of her car unlocked at night.

Sure it's different when you're in the city, but out here it's mostly older folks.

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