Ultrawealthy Homebuyers Are Driving Tree Loss in Ward 3
Since 2020, one-third of all mature, “special tree” removals happened in the ward with the densest tree canopy. Redevelopment of smaller homes into mansions comes at the expense of healthy trees.
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This story is part of Hola Cultura’s investigative series “The Shade Gap.” The series is supported with funds from SpotlightDC with reporting by participants in Hola Cultura’s Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning and co published with the Washington City Paper . The story was written by Francisco Rodriguez and edited by Christine MacDonald, Hola Cultura’s executive director and editor.
During the summer months, David Sayles’ backyard in D.C.’s verdant Wesley Heights neighborhood used to be his sanctuary. Partially domed by a lush stand of trees behind his house, he spent a lot of time back there. This year, however, while D.C. endured one of the hottest and muggiest summers in nearly a century, a construction site rose where those trees had been, taking with it the shade that would have cooled his and his neighbors’ properties during months of stifling heat.
“Other neighbors have talked about how they missed that,” Sayles says, referring to the lost trees. “Now, instead of looking at trees, they’re looking at this massive house.”
At a time when scientists say this year’s sweltering summer heat is becoming the new normal, and as global temperatures keep rising, the heat—combined with the lack of shade around Sayles’ house—made spending time outside too “oppressive.”
Sayles’ experience is not unique. As more properties are redeveloped and expanded in Ward 3 every year, more shade is relinquished as trees long integral to the neighborhood have been damaged by storms or cut down to make way for redevelopment. Sayles’ neighborhood has lost trees to both.
In Ward 3, where development dates to the late 19th century, most houses are large, detached single-family homes. A 2016 analysis by Greater Greater Washington found Ward 3 had the fewest number of row homes in the city and the largest median lot size: 5,100 square feet.
The historians and real estate experts we talked to say the ward owes its development and extra-large lot sizes to past racially restrictive covenants that limited who could move into its neighborhoods and federal policies that privileged White residential areas. That racist legacy—long since ruled unenforceable—is what gave the ward its appeal with large yards and lush, leafy neighborhoods. It’s also what makes it a magnet for luxury development today as developers can maximize building sizes, often at the expense of mature, healthy trees.
The construction behind Sayles’ home is located at 4615 Cathedral Ave. NW. It’s one of multiple single-family homes across Ward 3 purchased by developers each year, typically from the estates and trusts of longtime homeowners.
Tennessee-based developer Castle Sand One LLC purchased the Cathedral Avenue property for $3.85 million from the former owner’s trust in December 2022. Since then, Castle One has paid over $44,000 in tree removal permit fees to make way for renovations. According to the District Department of Transportation’s online database, Castle One removed 12 “special trees,” defined as healthy trees with a trunk circumference between 44 and 99.9 inches.
The District requires a permit to remove any special tree on private property. Due to the environmental benefits these mature trees provide, the city charges $55 per inch of tree circumference, aiming to discourage the unnecessary removal of larger trees and to fund the city’s tree planting efforts. While these fees can balloon to tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to many local sources, the fees do little to deter home additions, subdivisions, and other expansion projects.
Ward 3 contains more mature trees than any other ward. According to the city’s online tree canopy database, in 2020, the existing tree canopy covered 59 percent of the ward, the highest percentage in the District. (Ward 6 had the lowest coverage in the District with only 18.83 percent of tree canopy coverage). Since 2020 began, however, DDOT’s records show that nearly one-third of all healthy special trees removed from the District were taken out of Ward 3—the most tree loss of any ward except for Ward 8.
Analysis by Hola Cultura reveals that there were more than 3,000 tree removal permits in Ward 3 between Jan. 1, 2020, and mid-May of this year, good for 37.5 percent of all permits during that time. About 500 of those involve a fee for removing special trees that were contributing to the city’s tree canopy.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, tree canopy loss can leave affected areas less able to combat erosion and runoff, and more susceptible to higher temperatures during the summer months. A 2021 study published by American University found that across the District, neighborhoods where tree canopy covered at least half of the area were around 2.5 degrees cooler in the evening than those with fewer trees.
Brian Stone Jr., director of the Urban Climate Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says tree canopy has residual cooling effects on surrounding areas, meaning that removing numerous trees in a neighborhood can, in effect, make the area hotter as a whole. Even relatively little stands of trees, like those removed during redevelopment of homes sold at trust and estate sales, provide a cooling effect within a couple of hundred yards of those trees, he adds.
“We really need to have, dispersed throughout cities, tree canopy, even if it’s not thick, but just kind of continuous throughout … the fabric of the city,” Stone says. “It’s known technically as the oasis effect.”
And according to the Arbor Day Foundation, the shade from large, mature trees around residential neighborhoods can reduce air-conditioning costs by up to 35 percent during the summer.
Still, developers across the country continue to build bigger homes on the lots they purchase. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median square footage of a single-family home built and sold in 2023 was 2,286 square feet, compared to 1,500 square feet or less built “in the 1960s or earlier.” In Ward 3, this trend is magnified.
Ward 3, with its abundant single-family homes and wealthier residents, has some of the largest lots in the District, according to the D.C. Policy Center. When the home at 4615 Cathedral Ave., which was initially built in 1958 and renovated in 1977, was sold in 2022, the property had one and a half stories and about 6,000 square feet on nearly an acre of land, according to Zillow.
Building permits issued by the DC Department of Buildings show that the home will expand to three stories, and add an in-ground pool and a two-story “accessory building.” The renovated home’s updated internal square footage is currently unknown.
Joe Himali, a realtor who has operated in the District for over two decades, says larger homes with more space per person are trending across Ward 3.
“The overall trend for what people are doing is expanding out where they can,” he says. “If you’re looking at places like American University Park, recently, I’ve seen a couple of smaller center hall colonials where they put another layer on top, or they’ve expanded out both wings.”
For developers or redevelopment-minded homeowners aiming to meet spatial demands and maximize profits, Kenn Blagburn, an active D.C.-based real estate agent since 2004, says one of the most affordable options is to buy properties from longtime owners’ trusts and estate sales. Since D.C. zoning makes it difficult to build from scratch, and properties purchased through trusts and estates usually need rehab, he says they are the “backbone for redevelopment” in the District.
“Basically, they’re third-party sales. They’re not people who have lived in the properties, or if they lived in them, it was a long time ago, so they’re not emotionally connected,” he says.
That’s the case with 2921 44th Pl. NW, another property in Ward 3’s Wesley Heights neighborhood that has removed a considerable number of trees during redevelopment. Arca (Trust) purchased the property for $4.7 million, according to the Recorder of Deeds, from the estate of the former owner, Madzy Beveridge, who lived in the home for 51 years and died in June 2020. Arca is a living trust established in 2014, but there is little additional public information available.
Within six months of purchasing the property, the new owners received a tree removal permit from DDOT to raze 16 special trees; they paid more than $47,000 in fees, in what was Ward 3’s third-largest tree removal by total trunk circumference since 2020.
For developers, these costs ultimately justify themselves. The DC Office of Tax and Revenue now estimates the property’s value to be around $9.4 million after it was redeveloped into a 10,800-square-foot mansion on the property’s 22,000-square-foot lot, according to the Bright MLS database.
Mariana Barros-Titus, senior manager of community engagement at the DC History Center, says racially restrictive policies at local and federal levels shaped the ward into the luxuriant neighborhood it is today. The area is awash with green spaces, large trees, low-density housing, and large lots allowing homeowners to accumulate wealth, according to the DC Policy Center. It’s the wealthiest ward, with a median income of $141,849—1.3 times the citywide median—according to the DC Office of Planning. Around 72 percent of residents are White.
Following the Civil War, wooded and agricultural land in today’s Ward 3 was settled by formerly enslaved people, but when developers moved in decades later, burgeoning neighborhoods such as Spring Valley and Wesley Heights systematically barred African Americans and other ethnic groups through racially restrictive covenants, according to the DC Office of Planning.
Those covenants were largely deemed unenforceable by the 1940s and 1950s, but Barros-Titus says the policies nurtured the exclusive enclave Ward 3 is today, largely shielding its residents from fluctuating real estate prices seen in the rest of the city over the years.
Barros-Titus compares Wesley Heights to Ward 7’s Hillcrest neighborhood that was developed about the same time. But the median house value in Hillcrest today is the second lowest in the District, according to the Office of Planning. And Barros-Titus says those policies “definitely led to them being priced differently.”
Himali says he’s seen firsthand how discrimination continues today, as the current system perpetuates historic discrimination, making it “as difficult for other people to buy as possible in order to keep prices high” and “keep less affluent people out.”
Houses in the Wesley Heights neighborhood historically have been large, detached single-family homes in various early 20th-century styles, such as colonial, bungalow and Tudor revival, according to the DC Office of Planning. The redeveloped 44th Place NW property, which was completed this year, went from a 4,234-square-foot colonial house to a gigantic modern-style mansion with more than 10,000 total internal square feet, according to the Bright MLS database.
Himali says most prospective home buyers are indifferent to the number of trees on their property and primarily derive value from a house’s size.
“It’s the fact that it’s the largest house in the block that makes it valuable to them,” he says. “Even if it’s the worst built with the fewest amenities or the lowest quality build, as long as it’s bigger, they’re happy.”
Although residents typically enjoy the trees that decorate a neighborhood, he says, in many cases, people view trees on their property as another inconvenience.
“The things that people are looking for is the right number of bedrooms [and] bathrooms in the budget,” Himali says. “People love to look at trees, but … don’t want to have trees on their lot that they have to maintain because maintenance of trees is expensive and time-consuming, and another point of anxiety in somebody’s life.”
The scattered pattern of tree canopy loss seen across Ward 3, along with the numerous trees that summer storms and single-tree permit removals have taken down in recent years, impacts the area’s overall protection from the heat.
In the case of 4615 Cathedral Ave. NW, the property’s former owner, James Rowland Lowe Jr., a longtime Washingtonian who worked for the federal government and Union Pacific and owned a travel agency, died on Feb. 18, 2022. His trust sold the property to Castle Sand One LLC, which is based in Memphis, Tennessee, but registered with the Florida Division of Corporations, in December of that year.
Hola Cultura wasn’t able to learn much about Castle Sand One LLC, aside from its listed authorized person, Joseph P. Horner, an investment adviser, and its registered agent, David J. Bronczek, the former president and chief operating officer of the FedEx Corporation. He is currently on the board of directors at Tyson Foods.
Bronczek and Horner are associated with four other Castle Sand companies. Two of them currently own one property apiece in the District: the Cathedral Avenue site and a mansion in Ward 3’s Spring Valley neighborhood, according to the DC Office of Tax and Revenue Recorder of Deeds. Representatives for Castle Sand companies did not respond to requests for comment.
Justin Levitch, the president of RLAH Real Estate, says development companies often use single-asset holding companies to reduce legal liability.
“If somebody was going to sue the developer for encroachment on their property or for not building it the right way, or something like that, it’s an LLC just for that property, so you can’t actually go at the entire corporation,” Levitch says.
By June 2023, DDOT issued the developer a permit to remove 14 trees from the Cathedral Avenue property, one of which was a hazardous dead tree. According to DDOT, the $44,545 Castle Sand paid was the fourth-highest tree permit removal in Ward 3 since 2020.
For surrounding neighbors, the property’s renovations have altered both the feel of the neighborhood and their ability to enjoy their own homes, Sayles says.
A lush stand of mature trees stood scattered evenly throughout the lot before Castle Sand purchased it. During past summers, the trees’ canopy formed a dense layer of protection between the former owner and his neighbors and an ever-oppressive sun.
Sayles says he appreciated the “cozy” feel the neighborhood had before developers began building “bigger and bigger houses.” The general sentiment around the neighborhood is one of mourning the decline in greenery, he adds.
“It’s that sense of loss, the sense of change,” Sayles says. “I think people are discouraged. You know, you like to look at nature, and it’s sort of disappearing with all of this development.”
View all the stories in “The Shade Gap” series.
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