What Would You Do: A Stranger At The Door?

Living in a tight-knit community has its perks (last minute babysitters you can count on, neighbors who will lend you the lawnmower, bars where everyone knows your name), but sometimes wanting to be neighborly can pose as many challenges as living somewhere without personal ties.

What Would You Do is a place to discuss difficult neighborhood issues–problems you run into around your neck of the woods, when it’s okay to step in, and how to do it most effectively without sacrificing the relationships you’ve built over the years. If you have a topic you’d like addressed in the series, let us know (we’ll keep you anonymous, we promise!) at editor@ditmasparkcorner.com.

This week, let’s discuss a problem predominantly faced by neighbors who reside in or often visit local apartment buildings. Say you’re emptying your box in the mail area one day when an unfamiliar face shows up at the building’s outer door, implying he or she would like to be let in. Unlike deciding whether to open the door to your own apartment or house, you can’t exactly be sure the person at the door doesn’t live or otherwise temporarily belong there.

Especially with the cold weather over the past several months, we wonder, what’s one to do? Do you open the door and put your and your neighbors’ security at risk, leave the stranger in the cold, or do you have a better solution to suggest? And what if you’re on the flip side of the equation–as someone visiting a friend’s building or a building resident who for whatever reason doesn’t have keys, how do you approach folks you’d like to let you in? [poll id=”89″]