There’s a simple pleasure to walking through a neighborhood lined with big-leafy trees that shade the sidewalk, rustle gently in the wind and provide habitat for animals.
But trees are far more than just a pretty landscape feature. Among other benefits, they also block wind, provide cooling, and help to clean the air we breathe.
The advantages trees provide are not distributed evenly across neighborhoods in the Twin Cities metro area, according to a new tool from the Metropolitan Council that maps tree cover by Census block group, city, and Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhoods.
Mapping shade
Called Growing Shade, and built as a collaboration between the Met Council, Tree Trust and the Nature Conservancy, the mapping tool allows users — whether city planners, foresters, neighborhood groups or regular people — to see tree canopy cover across the seven-county Twin Cities metro area.
While ideal canopy cover is around 45 percent, according to the Metropolitan Council, different parts of the Twin Cities fall far above or below that, with neighborhoods that are whiter and wealthier tending to have more trees.
In addition to showing tree cover, Growing Shade helps users understand how climate change, conservation, environmental justice and public health intersect with tree coverage, and where planting and maintaining trees could have the most benefits.
“This is what Growing Shade is trying to promote,” said Eric Wojchik, a planning analyst with the Met Council. “The interconnection of the issues around public health, biodiversity, climate change [and] environmental justice. All of these are interconnected and the tree canopy is an avenue by which we can actually address some of the emerging threats that we’re facing.”
The benefits of trees
Trees have many benefits to people — direct and indirect, said Karen Zumach, director of community forestry at Tree Trust.
Trees conserve energy by shading homes in the summer and blocking wind in the winter. They suck up carbon and store it, reducing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. They slow stormwater runoff and reduce the pollution it causes by collecting rain. Trees increase property values. And there’s plenty of research that finds trees improve people’s mental and emotional health.
“We like to call them super heroes. There’s really not too much they can’t do,” Zumach said.
That means neighborhoods that have lots of trees reap the benefits of them, while neighborhoods that don’t miss out.
The city of St. Louis Park has been using the Growing Shade tool to understand where to prioritize putting in trees — particularly on private property.
St. Louis Park is among the first cities to use the Growing Shade tool in its efforts to build out tree canopy equitably within its borders. Overall, the Growing Shade tool shows St. Louis Park has 34.6 percent canopy coverage — higher than the metro area city average, 27.8 percent. But Census block groups within St. Louis Park range between 12 percent canopy cover and 54 percent.
The tool helps the city identify not only where more trees are needed, but areas where the city can focus its efforts to help residents plant trees, said Michael Bahe, natural resources manager for the city.
One of those neighborhoods is St. Louis Park’s Aquila neighborhood, east of Highway 169 and north of Highway 7, which includes many big box retailers as well as homes.
Neighborhood differences
Tree diseases, like Dutch elm disease, wiped out a huge share of the tree canopy in all sorts of neighborhoods across the Twin Cities in the second half of the past century, and emerald ash borer, which has more recently killed many of the region’s ash trees.
But many neighborhoods had fewer trees in the first place, Zumach said.
Historic land use is part of the issue: Industrial areas don’t tend to have many trees. So is historic disinvestment in communities: areas that were redlined tend to have less tree cover than areas that were not.
In North Minneapolis, a devastating tornado wiped out a large portion of neighborhoods’ tree canopy in May of 2011.
The lack of trees in neighborhoods like Camden, north of Lowry Avenue in North Minneapolis, exacerbates other underlying economic inequalities. For instance, Camden has 16 percent tree canopy coverage, according to the Met Council. Its median household income is about $46,500 and 59 percent of residents are Black, Indigenous or people of color.
Across town, St. Paul’s Summit Hill neighborhood northwest of downtown, has 42 percent tree canopy cover. Median household incomes are about $118,600 and 9 percent of residents are Black, Indigenous or people of color.
During one summer heat wave, Camden averaged 97 degrees, while Summit Hill averaged 94 degrees — temperature differences that push higher air conditioning costs in neighborhoods where the average person is living within a tighter household budget.
When you map temperatures during a heat wave, the difference in temperatures can be significant, Wojchik said, between places with more and fewer trees. “That’s a huge difference in terms of human health and how we’re feeling,” he said.
With climate change, temperatures are expected to rise, making the inequalities across neighborhoods like Camden and Summit Hill worse. According to the Met Council, the Twin Cities could see an additional 40 days above 90 degrees per year by 2050 (currently, we average 13 days).
Greening Frogtown
Another neighborhood in the Twin Cities with lower tree cover is St. Paul’s Frogtown, at 22.7 percent
There are reasons Frogtown has less tree canopy than other neighborhoods, said Patricia Ohmans, the director of Frogtown Green, which has a free trees program that aims to increase tree canopy in the neighborhood.
The majority of St. Paul residents are renters, and that’s even more true in Frogtown, she said. Trees can be expensive — both to buy and to maintain, and they require space, Ohmans said.
“Homeowners are more likely to plant a tree and care for a tree and even have a backyard to plant a tree in,” she said. Frogtown Green has done lots of outreach to homeowners and is now trying to reach more landlords to get trees onto rental properties in order to increase canopy coverage.
[image_credit]Metropolitan Council[/image_credit][image_caption]Map showing tree canopy cover in St. Paul. Frogtown is highlighted.[/image_caption]
“By the end of the summer you have taken these very inexpensive bare root trees and they’ve developed a really nice root ball and you can take them around to your neighbors and plant them in their yards,” Ohmans said.
Other neighborhoods have gotten in on the program, including Hamline-Midway and Summit-University.
Lisa Burke first heard about what Frogtown Green was doing at a Wednesday evening talk — over Zoom, during the pandemic — at Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, in Summit-University.
She and others in the church’s Stop Climate Change group decided to bring the free tree concept to their church’s neighborhood. Last year, they constructed a box and filled it with gravel. By fall, they had their first free trees.
The Canopy Connectors, as they call themselves, gave out 25 free trees last year to people in the Summit-University and Rondo-University neighborhoods. This year, they expect to increase the number to 75.
Way to go Tree Trust!
Karen (and she’s the nicest person you’ll even know) is such a tremendous asset to the entire state and has been a super-connector for all things trees. If your municipality wants to plant trees, sponsor a tree distribution to citizens or simply has questions about Trees; Contact Tree Trust and Karen and you’ll be on your way to a better everything.
Happy Arbor Day!
Maybe someone could have a chat with the Ramsey County Parks and Rec folks. They have money to burn on projects residents don’t want. Trees seem like a very worthy and deserving project. The money would do more good than creating more recreation in mostly wealthy neighborhoods who have many recreation options.
May I respectfully suggest the person to contact Ramsey Co is you Beth! You have a passion, use it to plant trees!
Happy Arbor Day!
We lost two trees in the past 3 years and can really tell the difference. Our cooling bill went up for sure. It’s easy to imagine the impact on entire neighborhoods when there are fewer trees.
A big part of the problem is the incompetence of the City of St Paul’s forestry department. They are spend tons of money cutting down healthy Ash trees, and then spend $350 / tree out of their limited budget for replanting. Why not buy replacement trees at Menards for $35 each? Better yet, why not get the Boy Scouts involved and plant bare root trees throughout the city? That might cost $1 / tree? Even if 1/2 die before they get established, we’d be light years ahead of where we are now.
Over here in Mac-Groveland, they’re cutting them down by the dozen and replacing them with pool cues. Even the neighborhood toddlers will never live long enough to see those sticks become a canopy.
By your description (“Pool Cues”), they are most likely Kentucky Coffee trees, which are considered a wonderful, urban/blvd tree. I’m sure any current toddler will see a beautiful tree when they graduates grade school.
I hope they’re not planting all trees of a single species. The prevalence of a monoculture of tree type is what has gotten us into this mess in the first place!
Planting a tree is the ultimate pay it forward scheme.
So has anybody looked at the tree coverage map against the housing density map? My guess is that the goals of increasing the density of both people and trees will be completely at odds with each other. Eliminating the outdoor spaces of single-family homes and covering them with buildings leaves a lot less room for trees.
It isn’t to say that increasing density and/or affordability can’t be done. It is just important to acknowledge all of the costs/impacts so we can evaluate various ways of encouraging that to happen.
Planting “pool cues” may make some folks feel they’ve done something green. But as more experts than most of us can count have established, protecting existing stands of trees is much more critical than planting sprouts. Michael Pollan has put it most succinctly in his New Yorker article (2013) on the intelligence of plants but he’s one of many who the powers-that-be of St. Paul have chosen to ignore as they mow down old stands of amazing trees and destroy our shade and carbon clearing majesty.
We would have more trees planted if people cared more for those who come after us. Unless you are wealthy and can afford to buy a large tree from a nursery and have it planted for you, that skinny bare root (affordable) tree isn’t going to amount to much during your tenancy. You are planting that tree for the next homeowner or the one after that. I have lived in my home for 30 years and those sticks I planted have mostly matured but I suspect I am an exception. Most houses in my neighborhood have changed owners at least once.
So true. Minneapolis has several parks & neighborhoods with mature oak trees – the last of the oak savanna that was here before. There are very few young oaks; which most people won’t plant anyway, because they mature slowly. Places like Minnehaha park will lose some of their character as these die off.
So now trees are discriminating against folks too, interesting. Planting trees is very simple, most soils will grow them. If take a small amount of time to prepare a bed for the tree before planting, simple watering will produce a healthy tree. Nobody needs an “organization “ to plant a tree, anybody can do it themselves.
But an organization can help raise awareness of the importance of planting trees. It can help educate a homeowner who perhaps has never really considered planting a tree and lacks knowledge of how to go about it (Everything is “simple” once you know how to do it – but that knowledge has to be gained somewhere and sometime first). And while “simple watering” will produce a tree, water isn’t free, and perhaps a bit of a financial incentive might be all it takes to convince someone to go ahead and spend the time and money to get a new tree started.
Nice work on this story, Greta Kaul! It’s thorough, comprehensive and full of accurate data. Thank you.
I don’t understand why landscape architects continue to plant birches in the city. The probability of a birch tree providing the benefits touted by this article is close to zero. A birch tree is a forest tree and most likely will die within 15 to 30 years unless planted in a very favorable spot. A city street is not a favorable spot. Canoe birches are hardier but their bark turns ugly as they get large.
One critical goal is to save as many ancient (100 year old) trees as possible. Every old elm needs to be treated for Dutch elm, especially those on city property. No homeowner should be permitted to kill an ancient tree on their property unless it’s been certified to be dying or damaged. A homeowner is just the legal guardian of the mature tree. That should be the legal relationship.
The old trees that every city has are worth their weight in gold and far outweigh whatever benefits one obtains planting a stick today.
Will the same legal relationship apply to the destruction of trees for mass transit projects or by local governments and developers ? The greatest destruction t is a result of these entities that see green space as an opportunity for progress and profit. I don’t have to look far from my home to find it.