At a meeting of Richmond’s Zoning Advisory Council last week, everyone wanted to make one thing clear: They all loved trees. 

“I have planted four on my property in the seven years I’ve lived there,” said Council Chair Elizabeth Greenfield. Maritza Pechin said she had planted an oak and a Japanese maple. Charlie Wilson said he had “dug plenty of holes to plant native trees.” 

What not everyone was so sure about was whether the city ought to require property owners who are building anything new to plant trees on their land as a way to help Richmond meet its goal of covering 60% of the city’s area with tree canopy by 2037. 

“This is a regulation that will impose a cost on the redevelopment of existing land,” said Preston Lloyd. “And when you add costs, it makes the affordability objective that we have that much more challenging.”

Still, as Richmond tries to become more environmentally friendly and reduce the urban heat islands that make some neighborhoods much hotter than others, some ZAC members thought the costs could be worth it.

“I would put this high up on the list, particularly as a burden that the development community should have to look at, because they are the community that generally disturbs the most land at once,” said Riley Champine.

The second draft of Richmond’s code refresh, an overhaul of the city’s 1970s-era zoning ordinance, introduced tree canopy standards that would require all lots in the city that are being developed to have a certain amount of tree coverage depending on how densely the area is zoned. 

Required coverage — which would range from a high of 20% in the least dense residential neighborhoods to a low of 10% in commercial, industrial and denser residential areas — would be based on an assessment of tree growth 20 years after planting. 

There would be some exceptions. Schools, recreation areas, water bodies and unwooded wetlands would not be subject to the rules. If development occurred without cutting down existing trees, the canopy requirements would be slightly reduced in an effort to incentivize preservation. And if an owner proved that meeting the standards would keep them from building to the density allowed by zoning or would create other defined risks, they could instead pay into a fund operated by the city for reforestation efforts. 

Notably, however, the rules would apply to everyone, whether they were building a multifamily building on a large parcel or rebuilding a home they occupy. 

“We do also need to be mindful of equating developers with a capital D to just people who live here and do stuff,” said Wilson. 

Richmond’s Office of Sustainability has enthusiastically promoted the proposal as helping the city meet numerous goals, including stormwater reduction and the 60% tree canopy target laid out in the Richmond 300 master plan. The most recent calculation, from 2021, put the city’s tree canopy coverage at 32%, down from 42% in 2014. An updated assessment is expected to be released this fall. 

Officials have been particularly concerned about heat islands, areas where a lack of shade causes temperatures to soar above what other neighborhoods experience. Research spearheaded by Jeremy Hoffman, the former chief scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, found that heat islands in Richmond today are largely found in places that were historically redlined — classified as “undesirable” by the federal government because they were home to large numbers of Black, immigrant and low-income people.  

Tara Worden, a manager with the Office of Sustainability, said the city has planted thousands of trees in public spaces and gives away trees every planting season. But she emphasized that Richmond will be unable to meet its 60% coverage target without property owners adding trees to their own land. 

“We know that we can’t meet that goal with just street trees or park trees and parks,” she told the Zoning Advisory Council. 

If Richmond were to adopt the canopy rules, it wouldn’t be forging a brand-new path. According to the Office of Sustainability, nine other jurisdictions in Virginia have set canopy minimums, governed by an array of rules. They include the cities of Charlottesville, Falls Church, Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Suffolk; the counties of Arlington and Fairfax; and the towns of Ashland and Blacksburg.

More may follow: While state law previously only allowed a handful of local governments to set such requirements, a 2022 bill extended the right to all localities. 

ZAC meetings this April and March saw some objections. Lloyd, a real estate attorney, has emphasized that the rules will drive up development costs and warned that Richmond faces constraints not shared by some of the places with standards in place. 

“Preservation is a lot easier in areas where large-lot subdivisions are being proposed and you have existing forested areas,” he said. “But when you have transit-oriented development, redevelopment of aging commercial corridors and other infill areas and opportunities that we as a group have prioritized, the cost of reforesting that becomes much more considerable, and it’s a constraint.” 

Some ZAC members have expressed discomfort with the idea of mandating trees on private property. Not all residents who move into newly built or redeveloped homes are interested in maintaining trees, they have noted, while others may prefer hardscaping or open spaces for children or gardens. 

“I just want to be mindful of some of the private property rights here,” said Greenfield. 

How the rules will be enforced also remains an open question, with Worden acknowledging that staff capacity might be an issue and that the Office of Sustainability hasn’t fully fleshed out how it would monitor whether trees planted during development live the full 20 years.

Still, concerns about the loss of green space have been a prominent theme in residents’ comments about the code refresh, with many worried that new development will crowd out trees and lawns while exacerbating excessive heat and runoff problems. The canopy proposal garnered praise from numerous residents in the more than 700 pages of comments sent to the Planning Department on the second draft, while Champine called it “one of the biggest and most popular things” in his 4th District neighborhood.  

“I'd like to remind us all that without trees, sunlight and soil, we can't breathe, much less thrive,” Copeland Casati, a resident of West Grace Street who also serves as a spokesperson for the anti-code refresh Richmond Civic League, told the Zoning Advisory Council last week. 

Others have pointed out that preserving and expanding tree canopy and promoting climate resilience are also goals laid out in the master plan, alongside fostering greater density and affordable housing. 

“I think we just really need to be responsible about how we balance those interests,” said ZAC member Melissa Savenko during a conversation about the proposal this March. 

Wilson too seemed to be considering the question in a similar light. 

“While I might not think that a requirement like this is explicitly needed, I am willing to think about a scenario where this from a storytelling perspective makes sense for this document as a whole,” he said in March. “We’re allowing more stuff and, yeah, we’ve got people who are rightfully concerned about trees and shade.”

Contact Reporter Sarah Vogelsong at svogelsong@richmonder.org