City Trees

For the last couple of decades, research documenting inequitable urban forest coverage by race and income in the United States has grown. Far from being an issue relegated to one city or region in the U.S., it is now clear that whiter and wealthier neighborhoods across the country have more tree canopy coverage than neighborhoods with predominately non-white res- idents and those with lower median income. 1,2,3 This finding of lower tree canopy coverage in U.S. neighborhoods with more non-white and lower income residents is coupled with another trou- bling finding: Historical racist policies and behaviors in urban areas of the United States created the current reality of inequitable urban forests. A study published earlier this year, for instance, linked hotter neighborhoods with fewer trees to histor- ical "redlining"—a racist housing policy in which mortgage lenders assessed risk for loans based on one's race. 4 This policy of "redlining" based on race arose in part from The Great Migration, in which over 6 million African Americans migrated from the South to the Northeast, Midwest, and Western U.S. to escape racism and seek job oppor- tunities in industry between 1910 and 1970. 5 As African Americans in the early-mid 1900s migrated to larger cities away from the South, they found sim- ilarly entrenched systems of oppression and conflict based on race—leading to another migratory trend in the U.S. called "white flight," in which wealthier, white residents in cities fled to the suburbs and reinvested their money in the economy and envi- ronment outside of cities. 6 Following "white flight" to the suburbs, threats to urban forests increased— from Dutch elm disease to Emerald ash borer. 7 However, the financial resources and tax base to adequately manage these threats had been relocated to wealthier, whiter neighborhoods in the suburbs. In the intervening decades, particularly from the 1980s onward, tree-planting initiatives via non- profit organizations grew in popularity across the U.S. as a means to address this urban forest decline and inequity. Such tree-planting initiatives have focused primarily on the ecological aspect of urban forestry—selecting species of trees to plant that could thrive in urban settings with a dense human footprint and extensive networks of built infra- structure. This approach to reforestation has paid little attention to the underlying social and political forces that led to the urban forest inequities >> Volunteers plant trees in a Detroit neighborhood in 2016 with The Greening of Detroit, a non-profit organization leading street tree-planting events in the city since 1989. urban-forestry.com 17

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