It’s no secret that real estate in Seattle is both scarce and expensive. Residential developers are buying land in every nook and cranny of the city, often cramming multiple town houses onto small pieces of acreage.
In my own Lake City neighborhood, we were awakened one recent December morning by the buzz of chain saws on a small lot slated for development. A tree service provider was illegally cleaving the branches off of a large Douglas fir, one of two trees on the property, the other a scarlet oak. We notified the service that by law, a public notice must be posted before tree work, something the developer had failed to do.
The fight to save our trees is surprisingly difficult in our supposedly progressive city. Both trees on the lot are considered “exceptional trees” by the city and grow in the Thornton Creek watershed, an environmentally sensitive area. Yet these factors seem to matter little, even though we are rapidly losing our tree canopy in Seattle and thus our climate resilience. That loss is nowhere more rapid than in areas like Lake City.
Ours is not what realtors would term a “desirable neighborhood.” Most of us live in homes with modest square footage and in dense, aging apartment complexes. Some of us don’t speak English. Small patches of sidewalk dot one street and another is plagued with speeders who use it as a shortcut. It’s easy to see how a developer with deep pockets and connections to the city’s regulatory agencies might feel free to snub the people who call this place home.
Yet what our community lacks in assets, it celebrates in our neighbors. After losing a large Atlas cedar last summer, we educated ourselves on the Seattle Tree Ordinance. The rules are Byzantine and confusing — and favor development — but we are unscrambling them the best we can for the sake of our community’s health. The impact of climate change is real and it is happening now. Our summers are hotter. On the lot next door, the trees provide shade for about 20 apartments and homes, most without air conditioning. In big rainstorms, these trees help soak up the water from the gravel driveways and paved streets. They also absorb carbon, filter the air and harbor wildlife.
All for free.
My neighbors and I are practical and realists. We know there is a housing shortage and are OK with building homes. We just want it done in a way that considers the trees. Both of these trees flank the perimeter of the lot and at least the Doug fir could be saved. The architect we hired to assess the plot said it can be done. Even more remarkably, in a leaked email the developer’s own architect said that it can be done.
We have met with the developer several times to try and work out a mutually agreeable solution. Each time they give off the feeling that we owe them the opportunity to do business in our community. In their own words, it’s just an accounting equation where they are trying to make the most money while spending the least amount possible.
But it’s time they and all developers introduced a new variable to the equation, and that is the local community. Although we’d like to think that what any of us do on our land is our business, our actions impact those living next door and down the street. When we asked the developer to consider revised architectural plans that would at least spare the fir, their response was to ask our neighborhood to pay for it. Pay for what? Their assumption that they had carte blanche to ignore our community? Their willful rejection of a workable architectural plan?
When a developer builds in a neighborhood and cuts down healthy, mature trees, they are the only ones who profit. They get in, they get out and move on to the next project. Meanwhile, our community realizes no gain. In fact, we suffer a loss because we, and the trees, are the ones who pay the cost.
