I live in Greenwood. The people here seem to love the idea of trees, but hate any of the necessary maintenance--picking up the leaves, (which block storm drains, causing streets to flood), trimming the limbs to keep them away from utility lines or hanging too low over the street and sidewalk, repairing the sidewalks when the roots cause bulges, etc. So, they do very little or none of it.

I used to do presentations for children on solar energy. I'd ask them what is better - solar panels or trees? (They, of course, loved them both). I'd explain to them that in Seattle, a tree is probably more beneficial than a solar panel, but across Lake Washington, a solar panel was probably better (due to fossil fuels in energy production). Then I'd point out that in the long run we may not have the glaciers that give us drinking water and carbon-free electricity, so maybe solar is the better way to go - but if we keep putting more people in the same amount of space, we might lose a lot of our solar exposure, and we'd surely lose a lot of our trees.

It left them feeling rather nihilistic and despairing. They don't let me do school programs anymore.....

I can't speak for all homeowners (and definitely can't speak for NIMBYs, please upzone my neighborhood!) but I planted some trees in my previously bare yard for shade and because I like trees.

I think in many cases it's sincere, superficially, but really the NIMBYs who go on about the tree canopy are engaged in a kind of identitarian green-washing. The want to prevent development in the city, pushing it out into the suburbs, inducing ever more planet-cooking sprawl. But they also want to think of themselves as environmentalists. Convincing themselves their saving the trees allows them to continue to believe they are virtuous, good environmentalists (in a childlike, Dr. Seuss kind of way), even as their primary anti-development goals could hardly be worse for the health of the planet.

Well, I guess I'm a NIMBY. All along my neighborhood the city of Seattle has put in rain gardens in the parking strips with your choice of trees or other types of plants in them. These gardens divert water from the street sewer drains into the ground where it can pool and then soak in. The water then doesn't run down to the treatment plant and reduces storm overflows. This is important for the health of puget sound. And there has been so much development in Seattle, that a sizable portion of our land is being covered over by structures and concrete so we need to use any opportunity to relieve the storm overflows that are being caused by water running through street drains.

(Also amusing: NIMBYs who argue tall buildings are evil because there's nothing in this world worse than the horrors of *shade* turning around and singing the praises of tree cover.)

Do YIMBY's really love concrete, developers, and tall square buildings with very small footprints and no parking?

Can't it be both? Maybe they love trees AND they're using them as human shields. Er, shields. When you use a piece of wood as a shield, it's just called a shield, right? Like Jon Snow after the Battle of the Bastards, with that wooden shield? Always knew that guy was a terrorist. It's the beard. It was a Bear Island shield. Child soldier armies, am I right? Basically the Boko Haram of the north.

I don't mean they love trees like Charles Mudede loves trees. No one loves as he loves. Don't even try you guys.

Where are these tall concrete buildings with *small* footprints?

Charles: stop using the term NIMBY. You and your colleagues at The Stranger delight in putting people in categories and pigeon holes. You demonstrate a misanthropy disguised as fighting for the "little person" or the economically disadvantaged, or those oppressed in one way or another. One reason your publication may have trouble holding on to good staff is that though many of you are middle-aged, you remain angry little boys thumbing your collective nose at the unfair world. The world is unfair, but creating turmoil for dubious purposes such as "economic profiling" in creating a class of people called NIMBY isn't going to help any of us. We already have enough real enemies and intractable problems to be wasting time constantly stigmatizing our neighbors as one kind of unfeeling monolithic bloc or another.

Wait. Did Charles just say that two objects can occupy the same space? Maybe at different times. Or maybe figuratively. If you love the tree enough, the hole its absence leaves in your soul will exists simultaneous with the condo that occupies its former physical location. I still feel the spirit of the maple tree I used to climb in the empty lot next to my childhood home in Fremont even though its now encased in a vinyl cube.

I don't think that completely destroying a city that developed somewhat organically so that Jeff Bezos can pursue his relentless effort to avoid paying income tax (and using the lack of an income tax to recruit his code monkeys), is an unqualified good thing.

Do you Charles conflate South (er, Serf ) Lake Union with Amsterdam, Barcelona, etc., etc. etc.? Or does it have the feel of an overgrown office park that sensible people avoid for any reason other than to work? (Been down there at night, Charles?)

And the stultifyingly monotonous urbanist "neighborhoods" of Hardipanel hovels being thrown together with complete indifference to aesthetics and construction quality? Does the new Ballard appeal to Charles's exquisite sensibility? They look like the kinds of buildings you throw up when your historic housing stock has been lost to carpet bombing.

Fast forward a few years, Charles. Is a city brimming with this excrescence going to be livable? I think It's going to suck big time. A lot of craven developers will make shit piles of money and the Stranger will get some extra clicks on its website, but any sense of architectural heritage or organicity will be destroyed. Old Seattle wasn't Paradise, but the developers are paving it to park a lot of people who'll be looking to get out as soon as they've been used up by the Amazon machine (what's the average job tenure there?).

For all your urbanist pretensions, Charles, you're pimping dystopia. If Jane Jacobs were to visit it, she'd never stop throwing up.

@13. No need to blame the rest of the Stranger staff for Charles. He is in his own league.

"Middle-class people hate anything that grows?" That may be the dumbest bit of class hatred I've ever read. Surely if you want to hate on the middle class you can do better than that. And why hate on the middle class anyway? Should we just all get poor & stay that way? Not a very good image to put forth if you are advocating for some paradigm world of equality.

BTW @6 - it is not trees that are blocking density. It is the insistence on SF5000 zoning. Plenty of room for trees next to multifamily houses.

"But there is nothing that says human density is incompatible with urban forest density."

Tell that to the developer who just finished up a "Scorched Earth" campaign on the property across from me, as he subdivided the lot and scraped every single tree and blade of vegetation from the property to make room for a pair of 3-story 4,000 sq.ft. boxes - with 5-foot setbacks.

I'm solidly middle class and I grow things. Lots of things. Fruit (3 glorious plum trees) vegetables and flowers. Lots of vegetables. I eat well during the growing season. The only vegetation I hate is morning Glory. Much like Charles, it's useless and very annoying.

Greenwood residents know he's right. Seriously: https://www.gofundme.com/save-our-tree This crap ain't about trees. It's about what will happen to the houses that live under them and what their owners can do with them.

I think very few of us have the opportunity of a view. For the rest of us mature trees add value to a home. Ask anyone in real estate

NIMBY is just the urbanist cult's N-word.

If you are opposed to building apartments in one of the biggest cities in the country, you're a NIMBY. You might as well embrace it! If you prefer, we could call you BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere) or CAVE (Citizens Against Virtually Everything)?

Instead of citing the density of trees that already coexist with the urban matrix, i think some good data to have for this argument would be, how many trees get chopped down and replaced, or not, in the process of upzoning.

@7: Chief Seattle isn't a tree terrorist. He was a murderer. You could ask the Chimacum, but the Suquamish and the Klallam killed them all.

If people care about Seattle's trees so much, why are so many of them draped in English Ivy, their branches strangled and breaking? Why, Seattle, why? Trees in green spaces, trees in buffer zones, trees in actual yards, trees along the freeway, trees in parks even ... suffocated by that stupid dirty nasty ivy. Hypocrites, all y'all. If you love trees, go outside and strip the ivy off your trees.

I'm a NIMBY too. Took a bunch of kids to plant native trees in the local green belt. The road by it has been upzoned. Yay for YIMBYs. But looks like any trees next to the steep greenbelt hillside will go. Who's ahead here? YIMBYs or NIMBYs? That's what this is all about. Not the trees for sure. Because more of them, especially the tall mature trees with deep roots, are gone.

A few years back, signed a neighborhood petition to plead with developers to leave a stand of mature trees on a large site. Lost the trees, but gained million dollar town homes instead. Gained artificial turf "yard" smaller than their master bathroom. The lawncare crew uses the leaf blower to maintain the yard. LOL.

Randommonkey dear, do put a sock in it. People have been trying to kill English Ivy here for one hundred years. Even if we were all to suddenly abandon hearth and workplace in a mass eradication effort, it would just come back. What we need is some sort of genetically modified super plant or wonder bug to kill that off - not your wannabe Lorax angerposts.