The war on... trees?

[TexanStar]

I already live in a city which does not tell me that I cannot cut down a tree.

So do I.

And in an area of that city where there is a huge marked-based economic penalty for doing so. That's working here very well. Developers go to great lengths to preserve large trees because they are economically incentivized to do so.

I would be interested to see more about it, because I have literally never seen a developer go to great lengths to preserve large trees. Around here, they are literally razed to the ground and then the dirt is terraformed into whatever shape the developer wants for their residential or commercial development and then after the new buildings are up they put in some tiny little baby trees.

Fortunately, my neighborhood is older and more established. Biggish lawns, huge mature trees, smaller houses. The new neighborhoods all have giant square boxes with roofs and tiny little yards all hugging eachother so that they can maximize the houses per development and the square footage per house. No es bonita.

 

[Klingsor]

Because of course, I see a difference in pulling up a shrub and killing a dog or a child and I believe that the latter two can and generally are reasonably restricted by law.

Wait, weren't we talking about *trees*? Guess not.

 

[Max_Polo]

I would be interested to see more about it, because I have literally never seen a developer go to great lengths to preserve large trees. Around here, they are literally razed to the ground and then the dirt is terraformed into whatever shape the developer wants for their residential or commercial development and then after the new buildings are up they put in some tiny little baby trees.

Fortunately, my neighborhood is older and more established. Biggish lawns, huge mature trees, smaller houses. The new neighborhoods all have giant square boxes with roofs and tiny little yards all hugging eachother so that they can maximize the houses per development and the square footage per house. No es bonita.

Depends on what the buyer values and to what degree. Baby trees work in some areas of course (we live in an area that was farmland twenty years ago). But there is a small creek that runs through several miles of this area where the trees are a hundred years old I'd suppose. In our neighborhood, homes were built to preserve as many as possible and the command very large price premiums as a result.

 

[Penis Aficionado]

I doubt it's as simple, anywhere, as "big trees" = "higher property values."

Big trees probably mean bigger lots where the trees didn't all have to be cleared to build the house. Big lots mean bigger houses.

Big trees also probably mean older, established neighborhoods -- which likely are closer to the city center and thus have higher property values.

I can think of neighborhoods in Austin full of huge old oaks and elms, yet with property values below the city average. Those trees probably increase values overall, but it wouldn't be crazy for an individual homeowner to think that a swimming pool or a mother-in-law cottage or a game room would increase his home's value more than a particular tree does.

But if he's allowed to remove that tree, he alters the character of the neighborhood in a small way. That tree helps shade his neighbors' yards as well as his own, and people can see it all down the street. If each homeowner made the selfish decision to choose the swimming pool or the add-on over a tree, the aesthetics of the neighborhood would go to shit.

That's why cities pass ordinances. (And I suspect that a lot of the wealthier neighborhoods have their own bylaws restricting removal of large trees. The cities probably just step in where proactive neighborhood associations don't exist.)