The NIMBY Label

Almost twenty years ago, when my husband and I bought our house in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, our families thought we were crazy. My parents could not believe that after spending my childhood in Germany and France, after my years as a single in Manhattan, I would end up in Brooklyn. For my husband's parents, it was more a question of having worked so hard to move from Brooklyn to Long Island to offer their son a better life just to see him turn around to get right back to Brooklyn after college.
Back then, people called us Yuppies, short for Young Urban Professionals. I never got that. After all, we did not work for banks or law firms. We were struggling for many years to cover the mortgage and to save up so that we could pay for some of the bigger renovation projects. Saturdays and Sundays were spent in dirty clothes working on the house and the yard. No architects, home decorators or landscape designers here. We did everything ourselves.
Now, twenty years later, we have acquired a new pejorative label; NIMBY, short for Not In My Back Yard, a label signifying that we question the mindless, style-less building going on here.
In our own way, we have contributed to Carroll Gardens becoming a desirable neighborhood. And now, we have to protect what we so lovingly restored from developers who don't care about the neighborhood. They see profit, we see a historically significant enclave in New York City which is worth protecting.
I am not against building on empty lots, but I am against building ugly boxes in the middle of a brownstone neighborhood. I maintain that it does not cost more to design contextually. We just have to demand it for our neighborhood. We have to speak up!
So if that makes me a Nimby, so be it. But I will be damned if I spent twenty years saving a piece of history for New Yorkers, just to have some money hungry developer build an ugly box.