I lived in a small, fly-in community for a while. I was very close to the airport, and some people had houses within a few hundred meters of the runway. There was noise, but it was managable because there were only a handful of flights per day (none at night) and there were no jets (the airport could handle them, but it was only intended for emergencies). But that is not the type of airport people are talking about here. They are talking about large airports with constant traffic during most hours of the day and night, with the planes typically being larger and much louder. These are the sort of airports that people can expect a significant loss in the quality of life from. I would expect people to be vocal about it.
Perhaps superficially, but no, not necessarily. A large part of the NIMBYism seen in places like SF is opposition to projects that do conform to land use regulation. The entire "by-right" movement is that, if the proposed project is legal (it meets zoning, codes, etc.), then it should be permitted to build. NIMBYs opposed that.
YIMBYs mostly aren't opposed to land use regulations, either. (Wanting to change the zoning of an area, or changes the specifics of the regulations is not "against land use regulations", or treating them any less strictly.)
People opposing airport construction still want to fly. They just want someone else to have the noise.
In this age of big data, is there a way to quantify this? My gut feeling is that this is a very heavily Pareto-like distribution, with maybe say 5% of the population accounting for 90% of the passenger miles or flight segments. With the majority of the people flying a handful of times (or less) in their life. And even then, "want" is probably a strong qualifier, since I'd also think the majority of the flight miles are for business travel. You may "want" to keep your job, so you have to fly sometimes. If we had to drastically curtail flying in the future, I'm guessing that not too many people are going to regret missing out on the business meetings to Detroit in January, compared to say, vacations in Florida.
Maybe they do in America. But in Europe there's not much need/want of frequent flying for the average citizen.
In fact when you live close to an airport you stop caring, perhaps not unlike smoke alarm chirps but without danger to your life.
Of course, everybody has different priorities and getting a huge noise source in your backyard after you decide to call a piece of land your home would be frustrating.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atat%C3%BCrk_Airport - used to be a very busy airport.
Or was that an ironic reply?
However, what I do not understand are the people who move next to an existing airport, and then complain about the noise. We used to live near a major, international airport. Planes flew overhead. That noise was implicitly factored into the price we paid, and we certainly had zero room to complain. But lots of people did anyway, soaking up lots of time and money that would have been better spent elsewhere.
I’m sure it doesn’t stop them from trying though. Reid-Hillview airport[2] in San Jose has been there since the 1930’s, long before anyone who currently lives there, yet is constantly under attack by residents and threatened with closing.
If you bought a residence in 1930, are you never allowed to complain?
Over time the number of flights, size of aircraft and time of flights can change. This can lead to increased disruption over time. It's not unreasonable to complain about an unexpected increase in disruption.
You can factor some of this into the price, but you can't factor in unknown-unknowns.
Airports can't handle the liability they incur because imposing airport noise on housing is a regulatory taking. But also, if you build an airport at such a remove from the city that no housing suffers, housing gets built out toward the airport.
Except of course, it's not a taking if you were there first. If the housing comes to the airport, there's no liability.
Also, airports don't work without being close to their city. When they tried to build Mirabel airport 35 miles from Montreal, it withered and died from being too far away.
This is transparent nonsense; 35 miles is not even a long distance. The airport you use if you live in Santa Cruz is SFO, more than 60 miles away. (There is a closer airport in San Jose, which doesn't go to convenient locations.) It takes a long time to travel between any major airport and its city. HKG is separated from Hong Kong by the ocean. A 40 minute drive to the airport is considerably better than is typical now!
If Mirabel withered and died from being 35 miles outside Montreal, that can only be because Montreal's air transport needs were already met.
> HKG is separated from Hong Kong by the ocean.
It's not just some affluent boomer's view or lawn getting impacted. Personally, I never want to live in vicinity of an airport ever again in my life.