Can Tacoma preserve tree canopy while increasing housing? City embarks on plan

Tacoma is embarking on a project to better regulate the preservation of trees in the city by 2027.

The preservation effort comes from work that the City Council and staff did on Home in Tacoma – a years-long rezoning project that allows for more types of housing in different parts of the city to boost housing supply. Home in Tacoma’s Phase 2 included specific guidelines for the protection of certain types of trees, but council member Kristina Walker said she and her colleagues wanted to update guidelines for tree preservation in Tacoma as a whole, not just in the parts of the city that Home in Tacoma addressed.

“We needed to research the rest of the city in the way that we had researched the Home in Tacoma area,” she told The News Tribune.

The resolution the council approved May 13 identifies four steps the city will take by 2027 to identify ways to regulate the preservation of existing trees in the city, while also identifying strategies to fund some of those regulations.

“Brand new trees are great, but they’re small and they don’t provide canopy, and it takes years for them to get to the size where they provide all those health benefits that we know trees provide,” Walker said. “So if we’re going to preserve trees, are we preserving them on every single private property, are we preserving them just in the right-of-way, and are we preserving them only if they’ve reached a certain point? These are the questions we’re going to be asking.”

The city’s efforts to preserve its tree canopy have been met with support from the council and environmental groups. The resolution passed with the full support of the council, and members of groups like the Tacoma Tree Foundation showed up to speak in favor of the item at the council’s meeting.

“Planting trees is an investment in the future, but we also know that protecting and maintaining mature trees in this city is the best thing we can do right now to protect our tree canopy,” Tacoma Tree Foundation executive director Lowell Wyse said at the meeting.

Developers have at times been at odds with city leaders when it comes to the management of the city’s tree canopy, even though they agree it should be expanded.

Kurt Wilson is chief operating officer of Soundbuilt Homes and a member of the Master Builders Association of Pierce County. Wilson said tree regulations that too strictly emphasize maintaining certain existing trees can get in the way of building new housing, particularly for fully grown trees that might occupy space where developers want to build.

Wilson said he hopes the process that the council approved this week will allow for flexibility in maintaining existing trees, with options like a requirement to plant a certain number of trees if an existing tree has to be cut down for new development.

“A lot of my concern is more with on the private landowner or development side of things, and having the allowances to meet the objective in more than one way than not just solely retention,” he told The News Tribune.

The council’s resolution identifying the four phases to tree-preservation regulations does seek to address those concerns, saying it “should carefully balance the vital need for additional housing development to address our housing crisis,” according to the resolution.

Walker, the chair of the committee that proposed the resolution, agreed.

“We know trees are good for the livability of a space and for the people around it, for the health of the people around it,” she said. “So everybody agrees that there’s good reason to keep trees, it just requires some trade offs and some creativity.”

These are the four phases of the tree-preservation resolution, with a tentative timeline of completion by June 2027:

1. Public engagement and external consultation, in which the city will contract with a consultant to start research and analysis for the project and solicit community input.

2. Budget proposals, which tasks the city manager to identify options to fund the city’s management of trees in the right-of-way, and outline a program to allow business districts to pay the city to maintain certain trees in the district.

3. Code development, in which the planning commission is tasked with working on new land use and development regulations for the city’s tree canopy.

4. Budget proposals, in which the city council will consider options for new regulations for tree preservation.