One day a few years ago at precisely 7 a.m., a bulldozer roared to life a block away from our house. We wandered down the street to see what was going on. Within half an hour, the modest single-story home was reduced to rubble. It took another half-hour to remove the tree that had shaded the house for 50 years.
In their place, a massive two-story house with attached garage was built. A spindly sapling replaced the majestic tree that had been destroyed.
After several months on the market, the new house sold for close to three times the price the developer paid for the old one.
So I guess I should join the real estate investment community in celebrating the soaring property values.
But Michael Swanson and I aren’t celebrating. You see, Denver’s forestry superintendent and I were tree-huggers long before the mayor announced his plan to plant a million trees in the metro area over the next 20 years. And if the scheme to increase the city’s canopy from 6 percent to 18 percent is going to succeed, real estate investors are going to have to become tree-
huggers – or at least not tree-slayers – too.
“A lot of investors will tell you they’re doing it to improve the neighborhood,” Swanson said. But leveling a city lot and replacing a little house with a monster with a three-car garage and two air conditioners is only an improvement if the selling price is the only measure of value.
Sooner or later, the strategy sounds a lot like paving paradise and putting up a ghetto of faux Tuscan McMansions.
“The two big things for homebuyers now when they shop for neighborhoods are walkability and trees,” said Shelley Bridge, a real estate agent for Re/Max of Cherry Creek. “That’s why the older neighborhoods in the city with the mature trees are so highly valued.”
But they are endangered.
That’s why the education component of the city’s ambitious tree-
planting initiative is huge.
“It has to be a big part of it,” said Swanson. “Otherwise it’s a waste of money.
The longtime arborist said too many people now either love their trees to death by overwatering and overpruning, or they neglect their trees, let them die and don’t replace them.
Too many real estate developers, meanwhile, value short-term profits over the 50- or 100-year-old trees in the neighborhoods. “That has to change, too,” he said.
“There’s a formula for assessing the monetary value of a tree,” said Jude O’Connor, director of natural resources for the city.
Some are appraised at $20,000 or more.
There’s also a city ordinance that prohibits property owners from removing healthy trees in the front setback in residential neighborhoods. They’re considered real estate that belongs to everybody, she said, so violators are assessed heavy fines for removing them.
But some developers have exploited a loophole in the ordinance and removed trees before they pull the permits for demolition and construction on the property to avoid the fines.
“We’re in the process of trying to strengthen the tree ordinance,” O’Connor said.
The city also expects to get a street-by-street inventory of trees from a satellite imaging company in the next few weeks, she said. Then neighborhoods with trees that need protection can be identified as well as neighborhoods that urgently need more trees.
Some neighborhoods, including Five Points, Westwood and Lincoln Park, are at about a 5 percent canopy, while others like Platt Park, Washington Park, Country Club, Congress Park and Park Hill are at 15 percent.
“The city has some beautiful trees,” Swanson said, citing oaks and walnuts and Ohio buckeyes galore.
It took decades for them to get established, he said, and it takes a visionary to appreciate what 50 years of sunshine and snow and care and nurturing are worth.
Denver doesn’t just need more trees, it needs more visionaries.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
