Good point. The Livermore airport is pretty hemmed in already; it looks like it would be pretty difficult to do much expansion and you have all those houses th

Good point. The Livermore airport is pretty hemmed in already; it looks like it would be pretty difficult to do much expansion and you have all those houses that are already under the runway approaches. I'm guessing that when you say "Bay Area jets", you are talking private jets, not 737s, right? In the case of the South Suburban Chicago Airport, noise is less of an issue. People don't want traffic and they don't want farms turned into warehouses and light industrial. And then the housing built for the thousands of jobs created. It's essentially opposition to sprawl, which I think is a pretty legitimate concern. I think the state could try to do things to help prevent it from being as bad as it could be (forest preserves, open space, minimum zoning, etc). Though I don't think they want to, because the alternative to this airport is that the one just across the border in Indiana would get enlarged, leading to all that economic development going to a different state.