The No Lock People
Share with others:
IT'S the lore and lure of bucolic small-town living: The community is so safe, people don't even lock their doors. But Joyce Weisshappel, a 63-year-old vice president with the Corcoran Group, a real estate company, does not live in a small town; she lives in Manhattan, in a luxury apartment building. And she doesn't think she has ever locked her door in the 30 years she has lived there -- she doesn't even know where the keys are.
Why would she lock the door, she asks. There are 24-hour doormen, delivery people cannot enter the building unescorted and she's never heard of a crime being committed there.
Matt, a 32-year-old marketing manager -- who, like many people interviewed for this article, declined to use his last name because of concerns about security -- does not lock his door, either. And the house he rents with two other men in San Diego seems far less secure: there have been at least three burglaries in the homes flanking his since September.
Matt has never had a key to his house. When he moved to San Diego from Honolulu on a whim five years ago, the landlord, who is charging him very low rent, told him that if he wanted a key, he would have to have one made, he says. He has never bothered and neither have any of his roommates. And there are valuable items in the house.
"We have three big-screen TVs in our living room, which faces out on a busy main street," Matt says. "I don't know if we're asking for it."
Isn't he concerned about theft?
"They aren't my TVs," he says. "Personally, I'm a minimalist. I basically own a laptop and a bed. It's no loss of mine if somebody were to ransack the house. I don't feel locking the door would make a difference. They could get in through the windows."
Why doesn't he worry?
"I grew up in Honolulu with my grandparents," he says. "They had a huge house with a security system. They got robbed three or four times. Burglars would just find a way to get in. My mind-set is if somebody wants to get in, they're going to get in whether I have alarms or not."
The No Lock People: You may doubt their existence, particularly in big cities like New York, but people who do not lock the doors to their houses and apartments do exist -- and in surprising numbers. A 2008 survey by State Farm Insurance of 1,000 homes across the country reported that fewer than half of those surveyed always locked their front doors. And while people who habitually lock their doors are incredulous that others do not, those who don't lock are surprised that anyone would be shocked by it.
In fact, just as there are cat people and dog people, Mac people and PC people, there seem to be Lock People and No Lock People. And when a committed Lock Person lives in the same building as a No Lock Person, things can heat up.
"It's the height of naïveté," says a New York businesswoman who identifies herself as a Double Lock Person. (She would not use her name, she says, for fear of incurring the anger of her neighbors.)
First Published January 14, 2010 2:00 am
