You have to talk with the people ...

Frequently while Walking San Francisco I come across a sign like this painted on the sidewalk. The city is generally enthusiastic about adding "street trees," those planted between curbs and sidewalks. Somebody is saying, forcefully, "not here!"

Street trees -- as it sometimes seems everything in this town -- became an election issue during the last decade. At a moment of budgetary shortfall, the city announced that property owners would be required to take responsibility for the care of trees in front of their parcels. If the tree was sick or a hazard, they were required to prune and/or remove it. Voters said "hey, wait a minute" by way of Prop. E in November 2016, placing care of street trees under the (currently scandal-plagued) Public Works department. We also created a $19 million annual mandatory budget line for tree care. These days, Public Works has made a census of all 124,000 city street trees and is doing maintenance, gradually.

San Francisco has all those trees in large part through the work since the 1970s of the nonprofit Friends of the Urban Forest. The area was mostly sand dunes and windswept barren hills until settlers from the US east tried to replicate the forested lands they came from. We have the trees we have because residents planted them. (We live behind a street tree, whose planting I chronicled here.)

All this is a long introduction to a fascinating account of why some urban residents have rejected tree plantings. The economically challenged city of Detroit struggles to make itself attractive for residents and observers alike. It has funding for 1000 to 5000 trees a year. What could be more improving than adding street trees? Yet a quarter of residents offered the free trees said "NO". The remembered history of city trees in their Black neighborhoods was of very bad times.

It’s not that they didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city.

... A couple of African-American women [a researcher] talked to linked the tree-planting program to a painful racist moment in Detroit’s history, right after the 1967 race rebellion, when the city suddenly began cutting down elm trees in bulk in their neighborhoods. The city did this, as the women understood it, so that law enforcement and intelligence agents could better surveil their neighborhoods from helicopters and other high places after the urban uprising.

The city was chopping down trees at a faster clip at this time. And the city was flying helicopters over their homes at one point—-to spray toxic DDT from above on the trees. However, the government’s stated reason for the mass tree-choppings was that the trees were dying off from the Dutch elm disease then spreading across the country. These were competing heritage narratives of the same event—-the clearing away of trees in the 1960s. The two narratives are in conflict, but it was the women’s version, based on their lived experiences, that led to their decision to reject the trees today.

Nobody had talked with neighborhood residents about Detroit's tree planting push. It wasn't that people didn't like trees. But when you've been "done to" for decades, you tend to look askance at gifts from untrustworthy sources.

I have no idea whether any such suspicions inform the "NO Tree" San Franciscans. The only local tree rejection instance I know of personally came because a resident wanted to be able to park on the sidewalk -- illegal, but once common in crowded neighborhoods. But the lesson holds. Friends of the Urban Forest tries to engage and consult with property owners; that means they have to be community organizers who prove they listen as well as professional arborists.

H/t to Erik Loomis for pointing to the Detroit story.