‘Not in my backyard’ sometimes means ‘Please don’t wreck my home’

There’s no place like home. Home is where the heart is. Home, sweet home. A person’s home is their castle.

Amid the time-honoured sayings — and even clichés — about that special place where each of us resides can be found this timeless truth.

With the exception of family, nothing matters more in life than home.

Whether it’s a mansion, bungalow, semi, apartment or condo, it is our place of safety and comfort.

It’s where we find refuge and relaxation, where we eat, lie down each night and rise each morning. And it’s where we and those we love can most freely be ourselves.

Few words so short mean so much as “home.” To appreciate this is to understand why so many people in Waterloo Region are going to such great lengths to stop change of any kind from intruding into their lives. Or harming their homes.

It’s become common to dismiss some of them as NIMBYs — self-centred advocates of the not-in-mybackyard mentality that ignores the common good. But putting them down this way, and trying to put them off, is often as unfair as it is simplistic.

Far from being the aggressors, they’re playing defence. They’re not just trying to keep something out of their backyard; they’re trying to save their home, as they perceive it.

And you don’t have to look far to see people intent on doing precisely this.

In Kitchener’s core, neighbours are trying to persuade city hall to block construction of a soaring, 12storey office tower near Wellington Street because it would leave them in shadows for much of the day.

In Waterloo, residents are pushing back against six highrises they say would shatter their privacy, jam local streets with traffic and wreck the appearance of that part of the city.

In Cambridge, a neighbourhood fought and, to its sorrow, lost the battle to keep a former golf course from being redeveloped into a massive, new subdivision.

Meanwhile residents in the Galt core are saying no to opening a supervised injection site in the area for illicit drug users.

Even in the quiet, rural hamlet of Maryhill, citizens are up in arms against a plan to erect a communications tower nearby that would dwarf the soaring, hilltop church spire that has been the community’s highest structure — and most cherished landmark — for more than 140 years.

To be sure, the neighbourhood activists in each of these cases present only one side of the argument. There are often compelling reasons for a new development, facility or structure to proceed — and with the blessing of municipal leaders

The fact that Waterloo Region’s cities have been designated for more growth and greater density guarantees the generation living here today will bear the brunt of a transformation tomorrow’s generation appreciates.

Sometimes, too, resistance to something new seems downright unreasonable — as does the ongoing campaign to keep a small Islamic prayer centre from opening on Waterloo’s west side.

But as this region experiences 21st-century waves of growth that are unsettling as well as wonderful and as the supply of neighbourhood disputes appears inexhaustible, it would be wise to remember two things that are constant in this world and somehow try to reconcile them.

The unstoppable force for change is one.

The irresistible appeal of home is the other.