Make Way For 2,500 New Fed-Funded Trees

What an awesome treat for kids to learn about trees what helps them grow and to have a part in making that happen.Nice job A great way to bring communities together.😁

I know I'm being a Debbie Downer but I hope the city has planned for sidewalk repair when the tree roots inevitably push up the slabs. It took at least a year for one real tripper-upper near me to get repaired.

@ LittleRat I am with you 100 percent. I have been saying this for years, The city must stop planting trees next to sidewalks and in front of houses. 10 years down the road sidewalks begin cracking and up heaving. As the trees grow they begin to block sunlight from houses causing roofs and siding to rot much faster than normal. Eventually the trees must be removed and the sidewalks repaired costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars. Start looking closely at the trees along the streets as you drive around the city. There are hundreds if not thousands of trees that are destroying sidewalks and must be removed in New Haven.

This is great news.

LittleRat/Toadster, for many years URI has emphasized planting the right tree in the right space. Some species have roots that grow horizontally, close to the surface. They are fine for parks, but should not be planted anywhere near sidewalks. In contrast, species that have roots that go down are fine next to sidewalks. My fellow expatriate Chicagoan, Colleen Murphy-Dunning, gets this. So do the rest of the URI staff.

You’re right that in many locations, existing tree roots have badly damaged sidewalks. When the city removes a dead or diseased tree, it should fix this. But healthy trees provide a host of environmental services. They should not be removed. But where possible, the damaged sidewalk should be milled to provide a more passable path.

My friend Steve Winter slightly misspoke when he said that trees were “the” answer. They are a significant part of the answer to several environmental and health problems. But dealing with climate change and environmental injustice will require a much broader range of solutions. Which Steve is working on every day.

IRIS's Tabitha Sookdeo: 50 new refugee students to be hired as tree ambassadors thanks to fed grant.

This is interesting. What's the reasoning behind hiring refugee students?

URI does great work.
And roofs don’t mold up because of nearby trees, they do so because of improper roof ventilation leading to condensation. Lichen growth could be attributable to constant shading but will damage an asphalt roof far more slowly than the UV and IR damage that a roof receives in full sunlight. Long story short, strategically shading a house with trees is a net positive.

The issue is not that we don't have trees to plant - we currently have over a hundred that still need homes this Fall. The problem is that URI only plants trees when property owners request them, and people in the areas that need trees the most are not requesting them. The city owns the tree strip as part of its right-of-way, and should be able to just plant trees there however they see fit. The whole setup with URI is actually extremely awkward, because the city itself should be paying people to do this work, rather than relying on a non-profit organization to pick up the slack.

Because the ADA is irrelevant here, the city prioritizes stump removal according to whether someone volunteers to water a new tree, not according to whether there are hazardous violations of Federal law that have $100K+ liability price tags attached.

Very simple version: Starting in 2015, a teacher at Fair Haven School was denied the right to use the accessible parking space that was nearest the accessible entrance to that school. The settlement of the resulting lawsuit in 2019 cost the city $390,000. New Haven Academy currently has no accessible parking space, in part because the city cut down a tree at an inaccessible accessible parking space but did not fix the sidewalk and make the accessible parking space accessible.

Fixing that one violation is problematic, however because it is in a majority White neighborhood. If we make NH Academy and ACES fully accessible, every public school in a majority White neighborhood will be accessible. Minority White neighborhoods? Not so much. Welcome to America.

@ Toadster - You can plant a tree just about anywhere if you select the right species of tree and engineer the sidewalks correctly. https://www.arborday.org/trees/bulletins/coordinators/resources/pdfs/003.pdf

PendingPolymath, fortunately, you are mistaken as to who can request trees. Tenants, as well as property owners can request trees for the tree strip. This makes sense, since more than 70% of New Haven are renters.
https://uri.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/GreenSkills_Info and FAQ for Tree Ambassadors.pdf

I gather you are relatively new to the city. The city used to plant street trees. No one was responsible for watering them and many of them died. The city then transferred this role to URI. URI requires the individual or group requesting a tree to commit to watering them. This is real work - a newly planted tree needs about 25 gallons (200 pounds) of water per week. As a result of this commitment, the vast majority of URI trees survive. My neighbors and I have planted about a dozen URI trees on my block over the last 15 years. All are doing well.

agostaformayor, I believe you are misstating current practice. When my neighbors and I agreed to water the new trees, there was no commitment to fix the broken sidewalks on the block. Subsequently, I have volunteered to help plant URI trees in other, majority black/Hispanic, neighborhoods. There was no connection between agreeing to water the trees and sidewalk repairs. Part of this disconnect is a matter of scale. It is more cost effective to replace 100 linear feet of sidewalk than to replace ten 10 foot segments.

agostaformayor, we are talking about two different things. Your comment dealt with stump removal. Based on your previous comments I inferred, perhaps incorrectly, that your underlying issue was sidewalk repair/replacement.

I don’t doubt that the city considers the willingness of neighbors to water replacement trees in deciding which stumps to remove. But the city routinely removes stumps without doing anything about the nearby sidewalks. Conversely, when the city replaced the sidewalks on my block years ago, it did not remove the adjacent stumps.