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Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Two places where I have lived, Lafayette, and here in Sammamish, WA. Both in areas away from businesses, with only single family homes on large lots, and very low crime. Lafayette is 75% owner occupied, Sammamish 86%, and in both places, neighbors tend to look out for each other.
I leave our door unlocked pretty frequently. But we are in a gated community (not necessarily safer than non-gated but in our case I think it makes a small difference)
We were just in Bar Harbor, ME and at my parents motel they left the door unlocked for them to check in and told them at checkout to leave the doors unlocked. When my parents questioned them on this, they said, yep, we're a doors unlocked type of place.
In 25 years in our neighborhood we have had one incident in which items were stolen from unlocked cars. Otherwise, nothing.
Same here down in San Diego. We accidentally left the garage (attached) open when we went away for the weekend and everything was there when we got back. A dozen surfboards, golf clubs, and every power tool known to man are all very visible. We leave our windows open when out running errands for the day, and the front door will always be open while we’re on the other side of the house. We’re in a basic working/middle class suburb.
Now when I lived at the beach anything not nailed down would get snagged by the tweaked out homeless. While it only happened to me once in 20+ years, you may get a disoriented drunk walking into your apartment at night.
Locking doors is not an inconvenience. It's a sensible precaution that I was raised with. It's also a statistical fact that the number one contributing factor to creating opportunity for petty property crime (both homes and vehicles) is unlocked doors.
That said, a certain household member of mine (I won't name names) has on several occasions, left the keys in the door lock while retrieving something out of the vehicle, and accidentally left the keys in the door lock either all day or all night. We've never had a problem, and I'm not aware of any property crime taking place in my neighborhood since I've lived there (11 years now).
If I left the house and realized I'd forgotten to lock up, I really wouldn't worry.
The one time in my life I had something stolen out of my vehicle, I had left the car parked on the street with the windows wide open for several hours.
Probably a lot more places than we assume, but the news has us paranoid about everything in life.
I've left my car unlocked on numerous occasions, accidentally. We've left keys in the back door overnight a time or two. Where we live now, in a condo complex in Wisconsin, garage doors are often left open either on purpose or not and nothing happens.
When renting a place in suburban Milwaukee a few years back, the landlord told us that people leave their doors unlocked quite a bit in the area. After living there for 3 years, I believed him. Not a lot of people snooping around there looking for easy targets.
Some people are talking about leaving their doors unlocked for a certain period of time but I'm pretty sure the o.p was talking about being able to leave their doors unlocked every day for the rest of their life.
Also some people aren't taking into account someone having millions of dollars of small valuables or other really important stuff in their house. The more valuables etc you have the less likely you're gonna be to just always leave your doors unlocked. I can't even imagine what it's like if you have kids. The chance is never 0%. Why not just ask for the safest places? Why would anyone want to leave their doors unlocked in the first place?
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