Living near an airport can be everything from dangerous to downright disruptive. People who usually live near these airports and their busy areas of traffic often try to get things at the airport changed, but it’s usually unsuccessful. One household in Washington D.C., though, took things to a whole new level by issuing over 7,000 complaints against Reagan National Airport in a single year.
We first spotted this wild statistic in a tweet from @AlecStapp that contained a screenshot of a page from a 2017 study conducted by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University — and the results were a shocking display of NIMBYism. NIMBY is an acronym that stands for ‘Not In My Back Yard,’ and it usually refers to homeowners or residents that oppose any kind of development in their area. It can involve something as simple as homeowners being furious about a local foot race closing down their streets — or it could involve folks living near an airport issuing thousands of noise complaints.
From 2014 to 2015, nine of the busiest airports in the country — Reagan, Denver, Dulles, Las Vegas, LAX, Portland, Phoenix, Seattle, and San Francisco— all received thousands of noise complaints. However, the most notable finding is that the bulk of the complaints often came from a very small group of people.
For example, Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport received 3,814 complaints from just 13 households in a single zip code. The study says that works out to 293 calls per household. Or, there was a single person at a house in Monterey Park, California who made 489 complaints against LAX just in June of 2015; that one person made up over 50 percent of the complaints that month. But this D.C. household really takes it up a notch.
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington D.C. received 8,760 noise complaints in 2015. A whopping 78 percent of those complaints (6,852) were made from just two individuals in a single household in the Foxhall neighborhood of D.C. The report details why these people were so determined to be heard:
The residents of that particular house called Reagan National to express irritation about aircraft noise an average of almost 19 times per day during 2015.
Look, I get being annoyed by plane noise throughout the day. Being disrupted from your work 19 times a day must be very frustrating. At the same time, though, the Reagan National Airport first opened in 1941 and was expanded to two terminals in 1997. There’s no way the residents making those complaints have been around all that time, getting more and more annoyed at the prospect of airplane noise. If the noise is that big of a problem, maybe don’t buy a house near an airport in the first place.
