The cicadas are where the uproot isn’t. Those of us living in the oldest, most unchanged neighborhoods suffer the most. I live in Delhi, which was first European-settled in 1789; a strip mall was added at the intersection of Delhi Pike and Anderson Ferry at some later point and pretty much nothing else since.
The greater the upheaval in an area, the fewer the cicadas. Claw up their feeding ground at any point during their 17-year period of tending to Cincinnati’s subway, and their numbers decrease, if ever so slightly. But in the city’s older neighborhoods, the shrill mating call rises and falls beneath the high, unearthly sci-fi upper tones of so many cicadas in so many places that they’ve created their own steady thrum of noise pollution.