As Nashville booms, builders topple thousands of trees with little oversight

Some Nashville home builders have razed lots to make way for big homes and planted nothing but shrubs around them, despite a city law requiring at least one tree. City inspectors have signed off on final occupancy permits nonetheless.

A tree advocacy group surveyed one East Nashville neighborhood in 2016 and found more than 100 new homes that fell short of tree requirements.

As more residents complain about losing large trees, officials and advocates are working to stem the loss of shade, flood control and other benefits they bring. Metro Nashville officials say the urban forestry staff (at just one person) is too small and the current residential tree rules are inadequate and unenforced. The city is now hiring more workers and officials are moving to revise landscape regulations. But the effort may hit resistance from the homebuilding industry, which has opposed recent construction regulations in Nashville.

“Basically, the developers can do whatever they want,” said Carol Ashworth, a landscape architect and member of the city’s Tree Advisory Committee. “What ordinances we have right now are not being enforced. The city has not put up the budget and the resources and manpower towards it.”

Ashworth and other advocates estimate that during the city’s development boom, Nashville is losing more than 50,000 trees a year. City officials are studying aerial imagery to make their own calculation.

Environmentalists argue that trees — even though they may be on private property — provide public benefit, and should be protected when possible. Their leaves and bark intercept rain, and their roots soak up water and create conditions for permeable soil. With fewer trees, the argument goes, cities have to spend more on stormwater control — building gutters, storm drains and culverts.

“Awareness becomes heightened when you have a building boom,” Councilwoman Angie Henderson said. “It gets people in the heart when they see a big, significant tree come down. But it’s a complicated situation because we need to respect people’s property rights.”

Officials likely won’t prohibit removing trees from residential lots. Instead, they will look to encourage builders to retain mature trees through a combination of permitting, incentives and monetary costs.

“Homeowners have to make the choice for themselves,” said Amy Clithero-Gill, an infill builder with Gill Design & Construction. She cautioned that the Nashville Codes Department is already understaffed, and adding additional rules to enforce could overwhelm the process.

Some neighborhoods hit harder than others

Two areas stand out for their lack of trees at newly-built homes, advocates say: The Nations and portions of East Nashville. Infill builders there often target lots with existing small bungalows, and then replace them with the largest home possible — or two homes, if zoning allows it. Because these neighborhoods were developed in the early 20th century, many lots have mature trees that are being lost to development.

The city requires commercial and multifamily properties to obtain a permit to remove trees greater than six inches in diameter (at chest height), but the ordinance has little to say about single and two-family residential lots. It requires that each residential lot have at least one two-inch diameter tree for every 30 feet of street frontage. How many trees the builder cut down doesn’t affect how many need to be replanted.

The city maintains a registry of protected trees under the Historic and Specimen Trees Program, but the process is voluntary and seldom used by private property owners, who have to consent to a deed restriction.

“You can cut down the tree, if you want, when you’re building your house. But that tree has value to the city,” said Jim Gregory, one of the founders of the grassroots group Nashville Tree Task Force. “We need to advance legislation to be more adept at protecting trees, for a city that’s growing at the rate that we are.”

Gregory points to one house that he says encapsulates the problem. Tree crews in East Nashville felled a northern red oak with a 178-inch circumference to make way for a new four-bedroom cottage-style home. The front yard today is dotted with some topiaries but no new trees.

“It’s an unfair competitive advantage that the city is giving to some builders,” Gregory said. “Those codes should be held the same across the board for everyone.”

His grassroots group surveyed Council District 6 in East Nashville and counted 101 new homes they say violated the Metro tree replacement requirements. Volunteers handed out flyers to owners of new homes without trees, encouraging them to ask builders to plant what’s required.

Council, advocates look to revise tree rules

While advocates say Metro Nashville is getting better at enforcing the residential tree requirements, the city is still inconsistent. At the root of the problem, observers say, is a lack of staffing in the Codes Department.

Charlotte, N.C. has 20 arborists who cover the city’s roughly 300 square miles, according to Henderson, the councilwoman, while Nashville has one that covers the county’s 526 square miles.

Nashville’s lone urban forester, Stephan Kivett, focuses on reviewing plans and inspecting commercial and multifamily development. He doesn’t have the time to approve single and two-family residential construction, so enforcement is left to building inspectors.

Before a builder is issued a “use and occupancy” permit, inspectors are supposed to check that a tree is on the residential property. But they have not consistently held the line.

“There are some hiccups here and there,” Kivett said. “But we feel like we are doing a much better job than before.”

The Codes Department has been criticized during Nashville’s development boom for its delays and inefficiencies. Some City Council members, including Henderson, fault the department’s outgoing director Terry Cobb for neglecting to request more staff members. Kivett said he is working to train more building inspectors on the city’s landscape codes.

“You can enhance requirements, but if don’t have staffing to implement and enforce them it is futile,” Henderson said.

The Metro Council approved funding for an additional urban forester in this year’s budget. Kivett said he is in the process of interviewing. Also, Metro Water Services is hiring an urban forestry program manager. Henderson said she wants to allocate more funds for tree staff in the next budget cycle.

How to encourage protection without penalty

Henderson is leading the effort on the Metro Council to address tree loss: “We are in the early stages of reviewing our current ordinance and seeing ways in which we might bring clarity to it and enhance it,” she said.

The residential tree rules could be based on lot size, since infill builders are sometimes constrained. For larger lots, Metro would look to protect mature trees, Henderson said, and for smaller lots, it would focus on replanting and finding ways to mitigate, or make up for, the loss of mature trees.

“To take down a 100-year-old tree and replace with a 3-year-old tree — that’s not of equal value,” said Mekayle Houghton, executive director of the Cumberland River Compact.

Builders say they need the ability to remove trees, especially on smaller lots.

“A tree can be right in the way of the only allowable footprint we have,” said Britnie Keane, CEO of Aerial Development Group. “If we can’t build around it, we plant as many as we can.”

Also, Nashville builders are often faced with troublesome hackberry trees, Keane and others say. Their soft wood is prone to breaking in high winds and their aphids excrete a sticky substance that coats items below the trees.

"They come down in storms, but they can be quite big and quite lovely," said Clithero-Gill, from Gill Design & Construction. "We always have an internal conflict about what to do about it."

New regulations could designate hackberry trees as hazardous and give builders more leeway to remove them (as opposed to more desirable trees), Gregory from the Tree Task Force proposed. "But they need to be replaced by a hardwood species," he said.

Some cities, like Atlanta, require that builders replace healthy trees they cut down, or pay into a tree fund. The number of replacement trees and the payments are based on the size of the trees removed. Atlanta officials are alerted in the first place because all builders have to get a permit to remove trees greater than six inches in diameter.

Atlanta imposes a $500 fine for removing a tree without a permit, and $1,000 for additional violations of the tree ordinance, or jail time. Nashville, on the other hand, has a maximum $50 penalty. Henderson said she was not aware of the city ever levying a fine against a builder for violating the ordinance.

But Henderson said that she is focusing on “Incentives instead of penalties.”

Today, Nashville offers a stormwater credit for infill builders who retain mature trees. If a tree six-inches in diameter or greater is preserved on a residential lot, then the builder can add less stormwater infrastructure such as cisterns or rain gardens. But Henderson said the incentive is hardly ever used, so she’s looking to restructure it.

Another goal, Henderson said, would be to protect trees remaining on a lot during the construction process. Parking equipment or stacking supplies over a tree’s root system can compact the soil and lead to the tree’s death. Sometimes a tree doesn’t die until a year after the home is built, leaving the new owner with the cost of removal.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the size of a northern red oak tree felled during development. Is was 178 inches in circumference, not diameter.

Reach Mike Reicher at mreicher@tennessean.com or 615-259-8228 and on Twitter @mreicher.