Atlanta doesn’t have to choose between housing density and its tree canopy – we must grow both.
In the midst of July’s record-breaking heat waves, the City of Atlanta released a study of our neighborhoods’ heat and flood vulnerability, which revealed that the highest temperatures are found in areas near Downtown, Midtown, and along arterial roads. Common among these areas are acres and acres of unshaded parking lots, roads, and asphalt roofs that trap heat.
The Heat Island effect, where paved surfaces and buildings absorb and slowly re-emit heat, can vary greatly within a city because trees and shade coverage provide significant cooling benefits where they’re present. Risks of heat-related illness and death are highest in low-income and poorly shaded neighborhoods where some residents may lack air conditioning.
Unsurprisingly, the study’s primary recommendation for reducing both extreme heat and flooding is to expand the urban forest. While investment in our urban forest is needed, those efforts must be paired with policies and actions that increase our housing density in order to ensure that our city is truly sustainable and healthy for all residents.
The unfortunate reality is most of Atlanta’s current tree canopy does not stem from a public commitment to sustainability. Rather, the majority of our city’s trees are owned and maintained privately, mainly on single-family lots. Trees are plentiful in certain neighborhoods, largely due to century-old exclusionary zoning laws that use green space requirements to exclude low-income, Black, and immigrant families.
Single-family zoning, which bans apartments in favor of detached houses with large yards, raises the cost of housing and prices out lower-income residents even as it provides space for tree growth. Meanwhile, the few areas that allow dense development, like apartments, are often near busy, poorly shaded roads and surrounded by pavement.
While Atlanta’s single-family-only neighborhoods may look green, they contribute to sprawling suburban development in our region that increases carbon emissions, destroys habitats, worsens traffic congestion, and raises housing costs. Whenever dense housing gets blocked by single-family zoning or other regulations, the demand for homes persists, and would-be residents are pushed further and further from our city’s core to far-flung suburbs, where cheap, sprawling housing is built at the cost of deforestation.
One of the most powerful ways we can reduce future carbon emissions is by encouraging dense infill of housing and commercial development around public transit. Denser cities support more people in smaller areas, preserving surrounding areas such as natural forests and local farms. Proximity to work and amenities reduces the need for fossil fuel consumption and supports sustainable transportation options, such as public transit, cycling, and walking. Apartments and townhomes require less energy to heat and cool, take fewer resources to construct, and can be more affordable than newly built single-family houses. Denser development also lowers the cost of public services such as roads, public transit, and sewers by serving residents with less infrastructure.
Critics often pit trees against density, but this is a false choice. We can protect Atlanta’s existing forests and tree canopy while also cultivating dense development. Allowing missing-middle housing, such as townhomes, duplexes, and low-rise apartments in single-family neighborhoods, would add density without destroying trees. Easing height restrictions would let apartments expand vertically instead of horizontally, preserving land for shaded green spaces. As the study itself recommends, features such as cool roofs can also bring down the temperature in places where reserving space for trees is too costly.
Higher-density development makes further room for new street trees and storm-water infrastructure. Parking lots could become dense, energy-efficient housing. Road lanes for cars could be transformed into tree-lined cycleways. If we’re willing to replace a fraction of Atlanta’s road space with trees, we could have cool, shaded streets even in our city’s densest neighborhoods without sacrificing limited, developable land.
As our city looks to update its zoning and tree ordinances, we must recognize that a “save every existing tree” approach ignores the realities of our environment, development finance, and housing affordability. We need to plant more trees, but mandating green infrastructure without providing adequate flexibility or incentives can hinder the dense development that we desperately need to lower carbon emissions house our growing population.
We need transformative action to meet the enormous threat that climate change poses to Atlanta’s residents and our planet. We cannot reduce our carbon emissions without challenging the fundamental systems that make our region unsustainable. It will take bold leadership and dedicated civic effort to end exclusionary zoning and stop our addiction to car-dependent sprawl, but it’s absolutely necessary if we want to be a city that is truly committed to providing a healthy environment for all residents.
“Trees are plentiful in certain neighborhoods, largely due to century-old exclusionary zoning laws that use green space requirements to exclude low-income, Black, and immigrant families.”
That is a sensational, biased and largely inaccurate generalization. In fact, our mostly successional urban canopy does not have so-nefarious a raison d’être.
Trees in Atlanta are simply plentiful on land where there is room and they are allowed to grow, whether planted or not. Absent humans and especially our exclusion of natural wildfire, this region of North America was historically hardwood forested with scattered pines and that’s exactly what tends to regenerate, given soil, time, and a lack of land disturbance or competition from invasive exotic vegetation.
In our capitalist-driven real estate market, higher-density does NOT leave room for more greenspace, trees, or stormwater mitigation. Ironically, without some form of deliberately exclusionary zoning, it merely leaves room for more higher-density development.
The existence of tree-covered neighborhoods is not so much testament to discriminatory land-use and zoning than the inability of some visionaries to recognize the forest that was here before modernity began mucking it up.
This is a ridiculous opinion piece. In addition to Lorax’s comments, these authors seem to believe we should want MORE business density in the city. We would all be better off if people in the city would seek jobs and relocate outside of the downtown, and closer to work places. Downtown development density is NOT our requirement, and mandating dense downtown development is the true FALSE CHOICE. Renovate around Fort Mac, like was supposed to happen. No one wants to develop business in Westside and Southside where housing is dilapidated because that’s too much “gentrification”. But let’s face it, no new housing is gonna be cheaper. No new development is gonna make prices go down. And, no new development is gonna fix the ATL City Council and Mayor to address infrastructure OR trees.
Good points, however tree lined streets need to take into consideration bike lanes and traffic vision at intersections which I have seen in several locations. Reducing parking lots with buildings is positive solution. However lightening the color of streets and parking lots would help significantly reduce the heat island effect and save energy using lower energy lighting. I think the density has gone a little too far. The wide range of tiny apartments for the poor and luxury large condos and town houses for the rich are not helping the problem either.