Safeguarding San Francisco’s Trees: The Urgent Need for City-Wide Reforms

Photo by Josh Klipp

by Josh Klipp

A walk down 17th Street between Potrero and Byrant sums up how San Francisco protects and grows its tree canopy. Seven new saplings, planted in December by volunteers with Friends of the Urban Forest (but without screens to protect them) dangle from arbor ties, hacked to pieces. Even if vandals hadn’t destroyed those baby trees, lack of care surely would have, as the City failed to water the trees even once for 6 months, despite requests from the public.

Or, take a drive up Van Ness. Between Market and Lombard, twenty-six of the newly planted eucalyptus trees in the median have been fatally sheared at the trunk, and three are missing altogether. This despite dozens of emails between the public and the SFMTA Van Ness BRT Project Manager requesting attention.

Historic Community Resolution to Stop Tree Removal

Earlier this year, with hundreds of trees succumbing to winter storms, San Franciscans accomplished a remarkable feat of unity: over a dozen neighborhood organizations signed a community-driven resolution asking the City to stop removing trees under City jurisdiction that did not pose a hazard to human safety. This simple resolution cited the City’s own documentation showing that, despite City plans calling for the urgent need to protect and plant more trees, the smallest tree canopy of any major city in the U.S. continues to decline.

When this resolution was presented to the City’s Urban Forestry Council for action back in March – a Council that has canceled seven of its last eleven meetings for inability to field a quorum – the Council could not garner support for the resolution because a single representative from Recreation and Parks believed it would prevent his Department from removing sick trees, or trees that were invasive or required to be removed by law.

Three notes:

(1) The resolution is non-binding and non-legislative.

(2) The Council was empowered to craft exempting language on the spot – a move this author would have supported, especially if it meant the Council standing in solidarity with over a dozen neighborhood organizations. The Council opted instead to take the Resolution back to committee and has since not met a single time to move this item forward.

(3) The now mostly absentee Urban Forestry Council, stocked with City Departmental representatives, is the only municipal body in dedicated to the work of tree protection and growth, city-wide. In the last two years, its main work product, the Annual Urban Forest Report, has been delivered nearly half a year after the legislated deadline of September 1st.

Unfulfilled City Promises

In 2014, San Francisco approved an Urban Forest Plan that called for 50,000 new street trees by 2034, i.e. an additional net 2,500 trees per year. According to the 2022 San Francisco Urban Forestry Report, the City has not net gained a single tree since that time but has, instead, net lost 1,263 trees. This count does not include trees lost in the winter storms or trees removed on private property.

In 2021 the San Francisco Climate Action Plan called for the development of policies city-wide, by 2023, to preserve healthy, mature trees during development and infrastructure work; and, in the event such trees absolutely could not be saved, for their “basal” replacement (in other words: replant as much as is taken out). To date, the only known Department that has even taken a stab at this is the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission – the result of a series of meetings with this author who agreed to withdraw a tree removal objection in exchange for productive conversation on how to align SFPUC tree policies with the Climate Action Plan.

Dysfunctional Tree Management: Public Works

Other City Departments continue to flail and, in some instances, flout the Climate Action Plan, Urban Forest Plan, and laws regarding urban forest management. The Department of Public Works, for instance, is required by law to maintain a list of trees that must be replaced following removal. As of October 2022, in response to a public records request, this author was informed that no such list exists. This same Department keeps no apparent running list of requests from the public for replacement trees, such as those trees lost during our recent winter storms.

Or go back to October 2016, when the Department skipped the standard, required public process to remove and replace a young tree on Palou because the tree didn’t match the City’s species palette for its streetscape project. Oddly, a private developer was recently required to go through that public process for a similarly young tree that it sought to remove for construction of a new ADA loading zone. (Note: This author was the Friends of the Urban Forest tree planting leader instructed to take out that healthy tree on Palou, at which time the anguished homeowner came running out because he had cared for the tree for a year. I was told by FUF that the Public Works Urban Forester, who lives on Palou, had instructed FUF to remove the tree. Had I understood this was illegal, I never would have done it. But since FUF receives approximately half of its funding from Public Works, I was also told someone else from FUF would’ve removed the tree in my stead).

Letting Big Companies Off the Hook for Trees: Public Works

In October 2019, Public Works agreed to plant six new 24” box sized trees, within 6 months, in the Civic Center / Tenderloin area, paid for by Tesla, after Tesla received a permit to remove a healthy tree to accommodate a bank of Tesla supercharger stations. It wasn’t until two and a half years later, when called to account for this agreement, that Public Works claimed it had done so, only for the public to uncover that trees were in fact planted with grant money by FUF, were smaller than the promised size, and were not paid for by Tesla (a records request shows that Tesla wasn’t even fully invoiced for the trees until long after the trees were planted).

Photo of 401 Parnassus via Google Maps

This is nothing, however, compared to the gift Public Works was prepared to give UCSF when it approved a permit to remove 28, mostly large and healthy trees, to accommodate its Parnassus Heights construction – solely on UCSF’s promise to replant in the neighborhood, somewhere, at some time in the future. Following public outcry (primarily by this author), UCSF was subsequently required to plant more trees and pay the City for the value of the trees it was removing – just shy of $400,000 dollars – as allowed under Public Works Code Article 16. These failures to invoice Tesla, and failure to bill UCSF for the value of trees it sought to remove, are meaningful in a fiscal year that the City allocated zero dollars in the general budget to pay for street tree plantings and replacements writ large.

Other City Departments Also Fail San Francisco Trees

Unfortunately, other City Departments fare equally poorly. While the Urban Forestry Council’s San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department representative claimed at its March meeting that, in 2022, SFRPD replanted trees it removed at a ratio of 6:1, that same Department actually self-reported a replanting rate of only 4.5:1 in the 2022 Urban Forestry Report. (Note: all numbers were reported prior to the recent winter storms). What’s more, in 2019, SFRPD COO Dennis Kern testified to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force that SFRPD has no record-keeping system for how many trees it removes and replants, but rather sits down at the end of the year and just tries to remember. SFRPD is the same department that took down ten large healthy trees in Washington Square when a contractor injured the roots of three of the trees during renovation, and did not penalize the contractor for that public injury, even while the contract seemingly allowed for such a penalty.

Aside from the abysmal state of the Van Ness BRT’s new trees – trees that the public fought for and won after SFMTA initially planned to raze nearly all the Van Ness trees – the SFMTA’s record is mixed. In 2020, the public objected to a tree removal for a Geary BRT crosswalk installation, a tree SFMTA sought to remove only after it had already installed all of the other pertinent crosswalk infrastructure. An SFMTA Hearing Officer required the Department to replace the tree in kind, and even recognized the ultimately removed tree’s environmental value – a sort of pre-alignment with the Climate Action Plan, for which this author is deeply grateful.

Then there’s the San Francisco Planning Department which, up until a few years ago, didn’t even have a checkbox for the existence of trees on potential development sites. To date, Planning continues to routinely approve applications for developments, new driveways, etc., without regard for or pushback on the existence of healthy trees that may be impacted. And, if a project says the magic words “affordable housing” or “accessibility” to justify tree removal, the City usually agrees without resistance, as if people who are poor or have disabilities do not also need access to mature, healthy trees.

Some Progress From Advocacy

There is some good news, however, which largely comes in the form of activism, and the rare instances when City leadership partners with activists who want to make this City a greener, more resilient home. Take for example Mission Verde. In 2019, the City proposed to raze nearly every tree on 24th Street between Mission and Potrero, approximately 77 trees in all. Community activists fundraised to hire an independent arborist, and forced the number of trees for removal down to 33. Additionally, they volunteered to take on the City’s work of three years of tree-watering, freeing up funds that allowed Public Works to plant not 50, but 150 trees along the Mission’s Cultural Corridor – an area that the Commission on the Environment has stated suffers disparate impacts of air pollution. These tree waterers – Mission Verde – are now in year three of their efforts. Their bright safety vests and hand-pushed watering carts have become a community thread along the 24th Street corridor, and they have not lost a single tree for lack of water.

City representatives will often claim that San Francisco’s urban canopy is a struggle because, in its natural state, San Francisco didn’t have a lot of trees. That’s true, but in its natural state, San Francisco didn’t have all these people, buildings, or pavement either. Green infrastructure is as critical as gray infrastructure. If that wasn’t true, then why does the City keep approving plans that call for more tree canopy in the name of community health and climate resilience.

This author challenges City leadership to abide by the call in the community-driven resolution which is quite simple: do not remove a single healthy tree until the City does what it said it would do in the 2014 Urban Forest Plan, and the 2021 Climate Action Plan. My Mom taught me that you are only as good as your word. San Francisco leadership would do well to heed her advice.