Bruce Nelson has lived in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood since the 1970s. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, standing on NE Going Street, he points out a section of sidewalk that curves to accommodate an enormous old deodar cedar. “The developer, I believe, had to get a special permit,” says Nelson, a longtime arborist and a member of Portland’s Urban Forestry Commission. Noelle Studer-Spevak, an environmental advocate who’s lived in Cully since 2013, chimes in to confirm: “Not just that—we had to go all the way to the mayor’s office to fight to save [it].”

Studer-Spevak and her partner, Eli Spevak, helped develop Cully Grove, the 16-unit cohousing community where they now live. The deodar cedar stands at a corner of the property. Studer-Spevak indicates where they were able to preserve other old trees in the development—a white oak here, a line of Douglas firs at the center of the community space. “Everybody thinks tree planting is really sexy,” she says, “but tree preservation is just critical.”   

Once upon a time, preserving trees was of least concern in Portland. One of the city’s first nicknames was “Stumptown,” earned in the middle of the nineteenth century after the area’s first white settlers cleared so many trees so quickly that there was little left but, well, stumps. (According to local lore, residents sometimes hopped from stump to stump to get around rather than splashing through the mud.) But David-Paul Hedberg, a historian who studies the relationship between people and trees, says those early Portlanders almost immediately planted as many new trees as possible. They started regulating them nearly as quickly, adopting rules relating to the planting and care of street trees as early as the 1850s. By the 1970s, locals took steps to preserve historic trees. In 2015, the city passed a formal tree code, officially designated as Title 11, to govern all trees within city limits, on both public and private property.

The code, in the decade since, has met largely negative reviews. While no one disputes the value of trees, some would argue the city has been overzealous in its protection of individual specimens. Homeowners seeking removal have met an onerous process, costly permit fees, or worse. Last summer, the city paid over $717,000 in damages to Sarah and Joel Bond, whose Southwest Portland home was crushed by a falling tree; they had been denied a permit by the city two years before to cut the tree down. Since eliminating most tree removal permit fees in 2025, the city launched a revision of the tree code. Draft amendments should be released for public comment this spring.

According to Brian Landoe, a strategy and planning manager for the city’s Urban Forestry program, current conversations revolve around the same tension they always have. “People really identify trees with what it means to live here, and at the same time, there is this question of…the way that we balance the public benefits [of] trees versus private property rights,” he says. 

Geoffrey Donovan, who worked as a research forester for the US Forest Service until 2025 and is now a consultant, echoes that idea. “There’s always going to be a tension between the private benefits versus the community benefits,” says Donovan, whose work has linked access to trees with public health outcomes, including birthweights (which are higher among babies born to those in ZIP codes with more trees) and cardiovascular health (also better in heavily treed communities). He’s happy to see some city pilot programs that feel more like carrots than sticks, like one that funds the care and maintenance of street trees and another that assists low-income property owners with tree care
maintenance.

Both Studer-Spevak and Nelson are members of the Shade Equity Coalition, a group that formed after the June 2021 heat dome to advocate for improved tree canopy coverage in Portland. That event exposed severe heat disparities across the city: In Lents, where trees cast a shadow over just 23 percent of the area, temperatures hit 124 degrees Fahrenheit. Across the city near Forest Park, in a pocket of a neighborhood with 64 percent canopy, it topped out at 99. While a typical year sees no heat deaths in Multnomah County, 2021 saw 72, all but three of which were attributed to June’s heat dome. “We used to think about climate change as, like, off in the distance, and we’re here,” Studer-Spevak says. “It’s on, full force.” The heat dome, she says, “was a deadly stress test.”

The Urban Forest Plan, adopted last year by city council, sets new targets for the canopy, which currently covers 32 percent of Portland’s land area. The Urban Forest Plan aims to increase this to 35 percent by 2045 and 45 percent by 2065, and to more equitably spread tree canopy across the city. For her part, Studer-Spevak says she’d like to see the city adopt a principle like the 3-30-300 rule developed by Canadian urban forestry expert Cecil Konijnendijk: the idea that everyone should be able to see three trees from their home, every neighborhood should have 30 percent canopy cover, and everyone should live 300 meters from a park.

Hedberg, who’s also a former member of the Urban Forestry Commission, notes how unusually hospitable Portland is to such a wide range of trees. “We have the ability to grow stuff from all over the world here,” he says. “We can grow tropical trees, we can grow Arctic-Alpine trees.” But he emphasizes that as the climate changes, so too must tree management. “The way we [assessed a] tree three or four years ago is not the same way we risk-assess it today,” Hedberg says. “It’s a discovery science…. This stuff gets a little more nuanced than just [preserving] big old trees for future generations.”