Yesterday I presented on a panel at the University of Washington’s Urban Forest Symposium. I’ve embedded my graphically challenged power point presentation below. The bad news is that tree issues continue to constrain housing production, which adds to costs, limits supply and therefore boosts overall housing prices. The good news is that we have grown neighborhoods and trees. Our tree canopy has increased as we’ve seen big increases in new housing development and construction. The increase in tree canopy is a real example of where we might be headed in a positive direction with regulation.

I did learn some things. First, tree advocates aren’t really all that happy with the methodology the City uses to calculate canopy. Is canopy really the right measure to be using. I can sympathize. I said that my frustrations with the City’s poor use and slack methods for quantifying things both “good” and “bad” is leading to really bad policy outcomes. For example, some advocates don’t think laurel trees should count in the canopy count. And deciduous lose their leaves for part of the year. I told someone how much this reminds me of the sloppy way we have been measuring housing cost burden using old census data and the normative standard that households should spend exactly 30 percent of monthly income for housing.

Second, there are interesting ideas about how to better quantify existing tree inventory and value; how much is that exceptional tree worth to the community? I countered that lost housing is also a measurable loss that can and should be offset for saving a particular tree. How do we balance those competing values of tree preservation and housing. Nobody at the City in an elected leadership role seems to be interested in answering that question. Instead we muddle along battling over every tree on every site rather than collaborating on a methodology that would capture the value of trees and housing as they relate to each other. But it was a good day of learning for me.