Canopy Planted 20 Trees for Free in Our East Palo Alto HOA

This year Canopy planted 20 trees for free in the Montage HOA (Homeowners' Association) at Pulgas and Bay Rd. Canopy purchased, planted, and will prune the trees for 3 years. At a valuation of $1k per tree, this saved our HOA $20k. The trees are funded by an ongoing grant that the City of East Palo Alto has with Canopy to plant trees in East Palo Alto, either on public or private property. Had this funding not been available, it is unlikely that our HOA would have planted any trees since it would represent over 1/3rd of our annual expenditures and learning how to plant trees would have been overwhelming.

I wanted to write this post to share how to organize a tree planting in your HOA, how to overcome potential challenges, and how to get the approval of multiple stakeholders. You can think of this as a runbook.

Context

The Montage HOA consists of 51 homes on roughly 4.7 acres in the northeast portion of East Palo Alto near Pulgas Ave and Bay Road. According to the East Palo Alto Urban Forest Master Plan, our neighborhood is situated in the 4 Corners / Bay Road Corridor neighborhood with a below-city-average canopy coverage of 11% (compared to 13.5% overall canopy coverage).

Because newer residential developments tend to maximize the floor area ratio, resulting in taller homes situated closer together on smaller lots (ours are < 2500 sq ft lots), there is not a lot of room for trees. Hence, newer developments like ours are commonly the ones with the least canopy coverage. In the drone photo below, the only visible trees are the few large ones in the city's public right of way along Pulgas Ave (bottom of photo) and those along the community park (center of photo).

Planning

Before I began to think about tree plantings in our community, I first got approval from the HOA to have Canopy plant a tree in my front yard. I was paired with Arlene from Canopy and I was very happy with the results of our fruitless olive tree planting in spring 2024. Around the same time, I joined the Montage HOA board.

When I learned that our City Council had renewed Canopy's contract with a larger number of trees to be planted (~100 trees per year), I reached out to Arlene again and scheduled an on-site working session to brainstorm places to plant trees. We had initially considered planting trees along the western wall of the HOA, in the park, and between the HOA-maintained front yards of homes. After talking to some homeowners and previous HOA board members, I learned that some homeowners did not like trees because they were wary of overdue prunings where trees were touching their homes. One homeowner last year had even asked the HOA to remove the tree in front of their home because it was touching their home, since the HOA had not pruned in a timely manner. Hence, I figured that it would be a lot easier to do this first set of tree plantings in the common areas away from homes.

I created a Tree Planting Plan Google Doc so that I could collaborate with Canopy and solicit initial feedback from the HOA board members, in order to streamline collaboration and ensure transparency. I included projected cost estimates, tree locations, historical context, and timelines. As part of my effort here to catalog our existing tree inventory, I discovered the Canopy TreePlotter tool (see linked blog post) and I included it in the Tree Planting Plan document.

I was pleasantly surprised when Arlene found Google Street View images from 2017 which showed that there used to be trees planted along the western wall of the Montage HOA. Because our roads are private, I would not have expected any street view imagery inside our neighborhood, and after 2017 there were indeed no longer any updated street view imageries. After more digging I realized that over 20 trees were removed in 2018 when it was discovered that our irrigation system had been broken for almost 1 year and many young trees (planted in 2015 / 2016) had died during the summer droughts. Upon researching through our HOA documents (where I also led an initiative to make documents available in a centralized Google Drive folder for HOA members to view), I discovered the builder's original landscaping master plan which did indeed have trees along the western wall.

Public Outreach

During the process, I door knocked on 3 different days to invite neighbors to the tree planting and to solicit feedback, and I spoke to around 10 residents. Arlene created a flyer which I posted on the eighborhood bulletin board with a QR code linking to a Google Form, and I sent that out on our HOA Google Group email listserv. Unfortunately, we did not get any responses digitally.

Approval

At our July 2024 Montage HOA board meeting, I invited Arlene to present our plan to plant 12 trees along the western wall on Holly Pl and to plant 5 trees along the perimeter of the park.

Arlene put together a nice slide show and the Montage HOA board unanimously voted to delegate me the authority to coordinate a tree planting in the HOA given that the trees were in the park and along the western wall.

Irrigation

I spent some time learning how to manually turn on the 12 bubblers that I found along the western wall to ensure that they were all functional.

Later, I discovered 2 additional bubblers (one on the day before the planting!) along the western wall and Arlene was able to increase our tree count to a total of 19 trees.

The park, however, did not have irrigation for trees. This was an existential threat for trees because insufficient watering is the biggest threat to newly planted trees. Because we are working in an HOA, there is no single homeowner and there is a diffusion of responsibility. Moreover, it would be inefficient and more expensive to ask our landscaping company to manually water the trees on each week's visit because there are no hose outlets close to the park. Therefore, to automate the watering I requested a proposal from our landscaping company to install 5 bubblers in the park to be controlled on a timer by our Hunter irrigation system. I was given authority to approve the proposal (which I cross-reference checked to make sure it was reasonable) and had it installed a couple of weeks before the tree planting. Arlene had come out previous to installation to mark utility flags where she recommended trees in the park.

Tree Species

I mainly deferred to Canopy for their professional recommendations on which tree species to plant. My criteria for trees were:

• minimal interference with underground utilities
• no fruit trees because our community was built on contaminated land and the developer had informed original homeowners about not planting fruit trees
• greater shade coverage to mitigate the urban heat island effect
• drought tolerant

We ended up choosing western redbuds and african fern pines for the western wall, and crepe myrtles for the park.

Planting

At this point, we had irrigation ready to go and tree species selected. For the planting date, we ideally wanted a weekend so that HOA residents would be more likely to be able to attend, but Canopy had a very busy calendar, so we chose a weekday to plant trees along the western wall: September 26, 2024. Canopy coordinated volunteers and we planted 7 trees.

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/canopy/albums/72177720320640522

The remaining trees were planted on Saturday, November 9, 2024. We posted a flyer on the community bulletin board and also sent it out on the Google Groups listserv.

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/canopy/albums/72177720322092061

Canopy also added the trees we planted into TreePlotter found here.

Your HOA

I hope this post can act as a runbook for HOA residents and board members wanting to plant more trees in their neighborhood. Planting a tree when you are the sole decision maker is hard enough, and imagine how much more complex the project becomes when there are multiple stakeholders and multiple layers of communications (e.g. through the HOA manager to reach the landscaping company). Canopy's executive director, JP, was very excited when he heard about this Montage HOA project because frankly there are not many plantings in HOAs. Canopy does have successful relationships with some HOAs in East Palo Alto such as the University Square HOA where residents can request a tree through Canopy, and where Canopy has done tree plantings in Jack Farrell Park (source).

From my observation of the canopy coverage map in the East Palo Alto Urban Forest Master Plan, HOAs - whether single family homes, townhomes, or condominiums - tend to be the areas with lower canopy coverage. They tend to be newer developments where lots are smaller and buildings are closer together, meaning that there is not much space to plant trees with canopy coverage.

While coordinating a tree planting in an HOA takes more activation energy to get started as compared to a single family home with a single decision maker, the results can also be much larger. By spending 5 - 10x more time on coordinating this larger scale tree planting, we accomplished 20x more trees in an area with below-city-average tree canopy coverage. Next year the ROI might increase to 40x, as we are already eyeing a part 2 tree planting of 20 trees for the 2025-2026 planting season.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out or contact Arlene (arlene@canopy.org).

Next Projects

This year I have planted 1 tree at my home and spearheaded a tree planting of 19 trees in our HOA. On the technical side, I have learned how to automate irrigation to maximize the trees' chances of survival. On the social side, I have learned how to take a set of unknowns and summarize it into a plan while getting buy-in from multiple stakeholders. I have also organized our HOA's first community event in years. After these experiences, I feel more confident in advocating for more trees at the city-project scale.

As Chair of the East Palo Alto Public Works & Transportation Commission, I continue to advocate for trees. At our 12/18/24 meeting, I advocated for more trees to be planted along the East Bayshore Road Pedestrian and Cyclists Safety Improvements project. CSG Consultants presented that they have around 20 trees planned, which is an increase from the previous plan before their June 2024 community outreach meeting where members from Canopy advocated for more trees. I will continue to follow the project and advocate for even more trees before the landscaping plan is presented to City Council as part of the Plans, Specifications & Estimates (PS&E) around February 2025.

I also continue to follow the Rail Spur Improvement project behind our Montage HOA, where I hope the City will plant hundreds of trees over the next year or two. I have met with the developers of 965 Weeks Street (Colibri Commons) which is expected to add 20+ trees along the Rail Spur where there were no trees before. I have also met with the Ecumenical Hunger Program which has recently expanded into a newly acquired adjacent lot, and I have connected them with Canopy for a potential future tree planting.

Lastly, I will continue advocating for hundreds or even thousands of trees in the recently approved Ravenswood Business District Specific Plan Update (Palo Alto Online) which has the lowest 2% tree canopy coverage in our City (Urban Forest Master Plan).

At all physical infrastructure levels, East Palo Alto is far behind our neighboring cities of Menlo Park and Palo Alto, but I continue to see our City moving in the right direction. By planting 20 trees and planning future projects, we have made significant strides in enhancing our community’s green infrastructure and addressing tree canopy inequity.