The Shade Gap: How Development Is Taking a Toll on D.C.’s Tree Canopy, Putting Human Health At Risk

This story was supported by Spotlight DC and a seed grant from the Fund for Investigative Reporting and co published with the Washington City Paper. The story was reported by participants in Hola Cultura’s Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning. The story was written by Christine MacDonald, Hola Cultura’s executive director and editor, and SPEL editorial fellows Lori Rampani and Francisco Rodriguez.

For nearly 50 years, children growing up in the vicinity of Talbert Terrace SE frolicked in a vacant lot turned communal gathering spot on this quiet Anacostia street. So neighbors say they were alarmed when they discovered a notice stapled to a tree just before Christmas last year. It informed them that the developer planning to build new townhouses on their beloved playground had received D.C. government approval to cut down 27 trees on the lot.

“It was scary,” recalls Micah Winograd, president of the Anacostia Homeowners and Residents Association, of the moment he saw the tree removal permit issued by the District Department of Transportation’s Urban Forestry Division. 

“I wake up every day, look out my window, and expect a tree crew to be out there cutting down trees,” says Andrew Hunt, AHRA member who has lived in Talbert Terrace since 2021. “When that permit was posted, it became very real and very time sensitive for us.”

The permit to remove 1303 Talbert Terrace SE’s trees is one of more than 8,000 tree removal permits issued between Jan. 1, 2020, and mid-May of this year, according to D.C. Urban Forestry’s online database. The permits are part of Hola Cultura’s yearlong effort to map where trees are being removed to make way for real estate development and find the streets and neighborhoods seeing the largest changes in the tree canopy, which are the branches and leaves overhead that provide cooling relief and purify the air; the tree roots, meanwhile, can arrest erosion and soak up extreme rainfall before it becomes floodwater.

Developer Mohammad Sikder, through his company Rupsha 2011 LLC, first applied for a permit to remove the trees on Talbert Terrace on Aug. 28, 2022. It took an unusually long time, but the permit was issued on Dec. 6, 2024, according to documents uploaded to DDOT’s online tree permit viewer. Sikder was charged $28,458.10 — making it one of the priciest permits issued by DDOT since the start of 2020. 

D.C. requires a permit to remove any tree even on private property. It’s illegal to cut down healthy trees with 100 inches or more in trunk circumference. But by paying a fee, property owners can get permits to remove healthy midsize trees—with a trunk circumference greater than 44 inches but less than 100 inches. 

For individual homeowners and anyone with limited resources, the fees may serve that purpose. Of the thousands of permits issued since 2020, more than two-thirds involved just one tree; the vast majority—84 percent—required no fee at all. But for developers and large institutional landowners looking to expand building footprints, the fees, according to many local sources, do little to deter them. 

Our investigation focuses on 50 addresses with the highest tree removal fees, totaling $3.1 million, since the beginning of 2020. The 80 permits issued at those addresses amount to less than 1 percent of all permits, but 29 percent of all healthy trees removed (the analysis excludes hazardous or diseased trees, those that are under the legal size limit, and exempt species). Those permits took out more than 50,000 inches of “circumference removed,” referring to the circumference of the tree trunks, according to DDOT. But in the case of 1303 Talbert and more than 600 other locations where the permits have not yet expired, the trees may well still be standing.

An analysis by Hola Cultura reveals large tree removals across much of the city. Ward 8 has lost more healthy trees to development projects since 2020 than any other ward in D.C., followed by wards 3 and 5, respectively. The trend has left residents increasingly vulnerable to D.C.’s two biggest climate change threats: urban heat islands and flooding.

With D.C. seeing more heat waves every year, climate change experts predict that by the 2050s the District is in store for 30 to 40 extreme heat days each year with temperatures cresting 95 degrees. Higher temperatures combined with canopy loss, experts say, is a recipe for urban heat islands—the areas where buildings and roadways absorb heat.

“Shaded surfaces can be 10 degrees cooler” than areas without trees to shade them, says Vincent Drader, Casey Trees’ director of communications.

“Remnant forest patches are really important ecologically,” adds Kelly Collins Choi, director of policy and land conservation at Casey Trees. She says the cooling effects of trees “function differently if you’re looking at street trees over pavement versus forest patches. That area in particular (1303 Talbert Ter. SE) is part of a larger forest patch, and when trees are grouped together they work together to provide a multiplier effect in terms of beneficial cooling and stormwater retention for the neighborhood.”

While forest patches provide the most benefit, even street trees can lower temperatures during hot summer days that can last well into the night, on average, according to Michael Alonzo, assistant professor of environmental science at American University and the lead author of a 2021 study of the cooling benefits of street trees conducted in the District. 

The study revealed that evening temperatures were 2.5 degrees cooler in D.C. neighborhoods where at least half the area was covered by a canopy from trees that stand alone and are scattered throughout the neighborhood compared with streets with few trees.

“[O]ur study shows we shouldn’t underestimate the role that individual trees can play in mitigating heat in urban areas,” Alonzo said in a press release. 

As heat emergencies, when temperatures rise to at least 95 degrees, were becoming an increasingly common component of D.C. summers in 2011, the District government set the goal of expanding the city’s tree canopy to cover 40 percent of the city by 2032. A larger tree canopy would help mitigate urban heat islands that can make people and whole communities more vulnerable to heat-related health problems, according to a wealth of peer reviewed scientific research that informed the city policy.

Heat illness can range from mild to deadly. Severe cases can become life-threatening emergencies that progress to difficulty breathing and loss of consciousness. Experts say extreme heat makes people with heart ailments, diabetes, respiratory conditions, and other chronic health issues more vulnerable to health crises. Ward 8, where the District issued more than 400 tree removal permits in the past four years, is home to large populations of people with chronic health issues that make them more vulnerable to extreme heat.

In recent years, the D.C. government and Casey Trees have planted a record number of trees. But young trees take decades to grow tall enough to contribute to the overall canopy. Since developers usually maximize building footprints, leaving less available space for replanting, the current trend also raises questions about whether the District will meet its goal of expanding the tree canopy by 2032. Since the District first started to study the tree canopy in 2006, tree cover grew steadily for several years, expanding from 36 percent to 39 percent by 2015, according to the reports DDOT publishes every five years. But in the 2020 report, the tree canopy registered a backslide to 37 percent. The next report is due in 2026.

Every location of large-scale tree removals has its own story. The trees at 1303 Talbert Terrace SE, for example, shade a grassy expanse with some playground equipment.

“We played there from sunup to sundown, kickball, baseball. It was a safe place for the kids,” says Karen Hilliard, who first moved into a house directly across the street from the playground in 1956 and eventually moved back to care for her parents after moving away for college. “And today, even today, parents get off work and come home, it’s a nice place to just go take your children.” 

The Anacostia Homeowners and Residents Association came into possession of the 2,817-square-foot lot in 1977, as the result of a racial bias lawsuit that led to the property being deeded to the association, according to the association. AHRA lost the property in 2016 after a D.C. government tax auction, and Winograd and his neighbors are fighting what they consider the unjust taking of their land, but they know those trees could be taken down at any minute.

While it doesn’t have an official designation as a city park, it’s the only patch of green space near them that doesn’t require crossing multiple lanes of highway to access.

At the back of the lot is a stand of urban forest that extends across a separately owned parcel, down a steep slope from Talbert Terrace nearly all the way to Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE. On a Google satellite view, it shows up as a lonely patch of deep green amid densely constructed neighborhoods and hemmed on two sides by Suitland Parkway and the Anacostia Freeway. The area already suffers from a lack of green spaces with more development on the way.

In addition to Sikder’s planned development, the Bethlehem Baptist Church plans to convert woodland adjacent to the Talbert Terrace playground into mixed-use housing, for example, displacing many more trees. Their removal, in addition to the 27 slated to meet Sikder’s chainsaw, would further expose the community to punishing heat that’s getting worse each year as climate change advances, according to Winograd.

“The trees on the playground make a real difference when it comes to the ability to have kids play,” Winograd says. “For example, at the Barry Farms playground, which is completely open, the heat is oppressive in the summer, and most kids can’t use it in the middle of the day.” 

Nathan Harrington, executive director of the Ward 8 Woods Conservancy, which has advocated on AHRA’s behalf, says it’s important to think now about how to conserve green space for the future as development takes off in Ward 8. Otherwise, he says, “in a best-case scenario, we’ll be back to where we started in 100 years.” 

“If each individual landowner is allowed to decide for themselves what to do with their land, and they all decide to put up high-density development, then there’s nothing. There’s no green space left,” says Harrington, a staunch proponent of preserving more of the existing canopy.

While city arborists review permit applications, most developers hire private arborists who are usually first to assess the trees. Before filing his permit application in August 2022, for instance, Sikder’s company hired a certified arborist who assessed the Talbert Terrace trees and submitted a letter with the permit application identifying 15 of the 27 trees as “hazardous,” which can be removed without a fee. An old oak tree with a trunk nearly 120 inches around was included among the trees the arborist identified as hazardous. Sikder only had to pay for nine healthy trees he plans to remove.

In its Keep Cool DC plan, the D.C. government describes its tree canopy expansion goals as “ambitious” but necessary to “increase equitable access to healthy, well-maintained trees … vital to health and climate resilience.” But an inherent tension exists between the District’s tree canopy goal and housing development. Harrington and Casey Trees’ Collins Choi say that, too often, these projects clear undeveloped woodland, rather than reusing vacant lots or underutilized land that had already been cleared.

Losing the Talbert Terrace trees that are part of a forest patch has multiple downsides, Collins Choi adds, including an increase in heat and diminished air quality. 

“That’s one of the areas that has some of the worst air quality and the highest asthma rates” in the District, she says. In 2019, Children’s National emergency room data revealed that children living in Ward 8 were hospitalized for asthma 10 times more often than children living in more affluent neighborhoods in Northwest. 

But since the wooded part of the lot is on a slope, there are also concerns about runoff, stormwater retention, and erosion. The site isn’t far from 1262 Talbert St. SE, a hillside development called Grandview where dozens of families had to hastily evacuate their homes in 2021 after the complex started to slip off its foundation, WUSA9 reported. 

“We see a lot of parallels in this case, with a lack of oversight and a developer with a bad history,” says CJ Brandmeier, another member of the AHRA; Brandmeier also questions the engineering soundness of building the town houses on that hillside considering the problems that emerged nearby at the Grandview development. He emphasizes that AHRA isn’t antidevelopment. 

“The vacant lot is actually a community-owned space—so something that our community literally owned for 50 years that was in essence stolen from the community by some tax laws in the early 2010s that were repealed two years later,” he says. 

In March 2016, the city government sold 1303 Talbert Terrace SE to Rupsha 2011 LLC in a discount tax sale after the AHRA couldn’t afford to pay the lot’s property tax. The association’s members say the property taxes skyrocketed after the city “unjustly labeled the land as ‘vacant and blighted,’” leading to an unpaid tax bill that ballooned into hundreds of thousands of dollars, AHRA member Hunt says.

Sikder, a longtime developer who owns several companies operating in the District in addition to Rupsha 2011 LLC, bought the property for $29,000 on the same day the city government auctioned off one of his own properties for back taxes, according to city records. 

This transaction was one of Sikder’s less contentious dealings in the District. In 2019, Sikder pleaded guilty in federal court to violating the Toxic Substances Control Act for failing to adhere to lead disclosure and lead-related work safety requirements for workers at properties that his company, District Properties LLC, was renovating. The company, at Sikder’s direction, also pleaded guilty to repeatedly making false claims to the city government about the age of homes he was renovating to bypass required regulatory oversight, according to federal prosecutors.

He was sentenced to 60 days in jail and given a $50,000 fine and 300 hours of community service. In 2021, the Office of the Attorney General for D.C. opened its own investigation into Sikder’s companies to determine if he had also violated D.C. law. In that case, the D.C. government fined eight of Sikder’s companies $400,000 for violating the District’s lead contamination laws in homes he renovated and selling those homes to unaware homebuyers. 

The tree permit Sikder pulled on Talbert Terrace has had an unusual trajectory. It is one of few in the permitting database that took years from application to approval. Our examination of tree removal permits issued since 2020 shows that permits involving similar numbers of trees typically took a few days to a few months from application to issuance. Sikder’s took 29 months. 

The delay was due in part to AHRA’s request in May 2023, through the Office of the Real Property Tax Ombudsman, to pause the permitting process temporarily, but the permit was later issued. It’s valid for six months, which means it expires June 19, according to the printed copy, encased in a clear plastic sheaf and stapled to a tree at the back of the lot.

Sikder did not respond to several phone calls seeking comment, but according to the site plan filed with DDOT, he plans to build multiple town house units, wiping out the community playground and woodland. 

Other than the DDOT tree removal permit, Sikder’s proposed development requires permits from the Department of Energy and Environment and the Department of Buildings. The property has pending permits for tree removals and the beginning of construction from the DOB, according to the agency’s online database.

“It’s not clear how DOB, DOEE, and DDOT all communicate and enforce this,” Brandmeier says. Developers are supposed to have all of their building permits before removing trees to ensure that lots aren’t preemptively cleared and stand vacant for years.

Hola Cultura reached out to DDOT and the Urban Forestry Division several times, starting May 14 but agency officials have yet to respond. 

If Sikder cuts down the trees and the development later fails to receive all the required permits, “we will lose decades of tree growth just like that,” Hunt says. “Even if the playground remains, trees take time to grow.”

The AHRA has proposed that the city acquire the property for public use under an eminent domain action. Brandmeier estimates this would cost the city around $800,000, or 0.7 percent of the Department of Parks and Recreation’s budget for capital projects in Ward 8 this year, which he says is “an incredibly reasonable ask.”

These community members say new development doesn’t have to come at the expense of the surrounding greenery. 

“If you were to build units, it stands to reason that there should be a conversation about how do you replace, or at least to a certain percentage, ensure that the green space remains in the area that you’re removing,” Hunt says. 

In response to the city’s housing shortfall, at the beginning of her second term, Mayor Muriel Bowser pledged to create 36,000 new housing units by this year, 12,000 of which were to be designated affordable to those “earning below 80% of the Median Family Income.” So far, her administration has exceeded the total housing unit goal with 40,178 new units, though it currently falls short by about 1,500 affordable housing units. 

But Harrington finds it particularly frustrating that the ward’s remaining trees are coming down in order to put up housing that remains unattainable to many residents in Ward 8, where the median household income is around $50,000, less than half of the citywide median income, and where more than a quarter of the ward’s population lives below the poverty line.

“It’s not affordable to the people who live here now,” Harrington says. “You can label it affordable, and yet it still contributes to displacement.”

Last year, homeowners in Ward 8 filed a housing discrimination complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, expressing that the District’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit system violated the Fair Housing Act by building those units in majority Black neighborhoods and forgoing the amenities that should have come with them. 

The plaintiffs argue that the D.C. government is engaged in a modern form of redlining; by not investing in the communities where the tax credit housing is concentrated, the development of communities is subsequently suppressed.

“The city’s building all high-density, income-capped housing in areas originally zoned for single-family homes and they’re taking away opportunities for us to increase the green space,”  Nikki Waddell, one of the litigants, told the Informer. “It’s a concrete jungle.”

Chris David, vice president of geographic information systems and data science at American Forests, which has helped launch the Tree Equity Score website to spark those conversations, says the solution in any city starts when “tree advocates and development advocates work together,” even though “they’ve been pitted as foes in the past.”

“There is a solution to this,” he says. “We do need to solve the housing crisis, and we do need to continue planting trees and protecting trees.”

Collins Choi would also like to see more discussion of what is considered “the highest and best use” of land, one that takes into account how climate change is affecting our environment and putting people at greater risk.

“You can quantify ecosystem service benefits, but they’re never truly a part of the equation when it comes to development,” she says.

For Talbert Terrace SE resident Brandmeier, it feels as if his neighborhood is fighting against the clock.

“Our community is out of time,” Brandmeier says. “The tree permit is issued, the trees will be removed, so we’re completely out of time.”

This article has been updated to clarify that CJ Brandmeier’s estimates for the cost of purchasing the Talbert Terrace property is based on DPR’s current capital budget for Ward 8.