Robert Hill was watching television in his house at Glenvarna Drive with his partner and his disabled mother on Saturday night when the attack happened.
"It was about 10 o'clock. I was sitting watching TV and I went into the kitchen to make myself a sandwich. I looked out the window and saw flames coming from the greenhouse out the back. I ran outside and got the garden hose and luckily I managed to put the fire out pretty quickly," he explained.
Mr Hill, a councillor for the University ward, said that the attack could easily have had deadly consequences for his family and his neighbours.
"The greenhouse is only about two feet from the oil tank, so if I hadn't walked into the kitchen and seen the fire when I did God knows what might've happened.
"There's only a bit of a hedge between my oil tank and next door's, so if mine had gone up there's would have gone up too. We were extremely lucky that this wasn't a lot worse.
"Myself and my partner were supposed to be out at a concert on Saturday night, but something came up at the last minute and we couldn't go. If my mother had been here on her own she wouldn't have heard a thing. If it had burned for another five or ten minutes who knows what might have happened," he added.
The perspex greenhouse, which backs onto a laneway at the rear of Mr Hill's property, was forced open by the perpetrators using a piece of wood torn from his garden fence. Rolled up newspapers attached to a petrol canister were then placed inside and set alight.
The newspapers and petrol container were taken away by the police for forensic examination.
The DUP man says he has no idea why he and his family would be targeted in such a way.
"They brought a canister of petrol and a wad of newspapers, so they knew what they were doing, but I've no idea why they did it," he said.
Mr Hill described the arsonists as "faceless, cowardly morons" and appealed for anyone with information about the incident to contact Newtownabbey police.
"These idiots must be apprehended and taken off our streets before someone is seriously injured or even killed," he said.