For this community, trees bring more than shade. They represent justice.

The grumble of car engines whizzing by seems to fade when Yvonne Lalyre talks about the trees. Her eyes sparkle above her mask as she walks the row of natural sentinels between her neighborhood, Roxbury, and the asphalt urban artery that is Melnea Cass Boulevard.

“They’re like lungs,” Ms. Lalyre says, looking up in reverence at the canopy of green. “Without the trees, we would just ...”

Her eyes dim as she trails off with a sigh. “I don’t know. It would be so much worse.”

The trees that line the boulevard have been at the center of tensions between Roxbury residents and the city of Boston for the past year. City plans to overhaul the boulevard included cutting many of those trees, thus removing a large portion of the tree canopy in the low-income and largely Black and brown neighborhood.

In cities across the United States, research has found that tree canopy typically inversely correlates with income – and that the lack of greenery is making those neighborhoods hotter and more polluted, among other detrimental effects.

But in Boston and other cities, there appears to be a shift in thought. As more communities start to map their trees, more residents are getting involved in the conversation.

“Caring for the trees is a way to look at caring for our people,” says Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne, director of the Spatial Analysis Laboratory in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont.

Heightened attention to green space is a hopeful sign, he says. Quantifying the urban forest opens the door to conversing about it in the same terms as anything else in the built urban environment.

Repeating the past?

For Carmen Storms, the idea that construction workers would raze the trees along Melnea Cass Boulevard echoes the traumas of Boston’s urban renewal boom in the 1950s and 1960s. Her family was twice driven from their home when the city used eminent domain to take homes and businesses in largely Black neighborhoods. The boulevard was created in the wake of that.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Yvonne Lalyre holds blueprints with plans that show trees bordering Melnea Cass Boulevard that were scheduled to be either cut down or have their roots cut – as indicated by the red X's – so the road can be widened and bike paths added.

In Roxbury, Boston had planned to build an inner beltway highway. The city took and subsequently bulldozed property for that purpose. But when the road project was scrapped, Boston turned that swath of land into the boulevard, and named it after local civil rights hero Melnea Cass. That project included planting 600 trees. 

Ms. Storms has grown up with those trees, and she now enjoys looking out at the canopy from her eighth-floor apartment window.

“If they take these trees, we’ll be like a no-man’s land,” she says. 

Today, Melnea Cass Boulevard connects Interstate 93 to many of the Boston neighborhoods southwest of downtown. It’s a main thoroughfare for commuters, too. The row of trees that lines the four-lane road forms a sort of shield for the surrounding neighborhood. And such splotches of green amid the cement and asphalt may prove crucial to helping urban communities weather global temperature rise.

But the city plans to overhaul the boulevard in an effort to make it safer and more pedestrian-friendly. The blueprints, up until late January, included removing 124 of those trees and cutting the roots of at least 200 more, which Ms. Lalyre calls “a death sentence.”

Mr. O’Neil-Dunne says, “Trees and construction don’t mix.” Trees need space for their roots to expand. They also can take decades to mature and provide any benefits, so replacing mature trees with saplings – as the original plan outlined – would be a loss for years.

“Heat islands” and relief

Roxbury is already one of Boston’s “heat islands,” a neighborhood that experiences higher temperatures than the rest of the city because of how much asphalt and how little green space make up the landscape. And it’s only going to get dangerously hotter, according to the city’s projections. Furthermore, scientists say greenery is essential to combat air pollution and keep an environment healthy for humans.

“Fresh air is not something we should have to fight for,” says Aziza Robinson, whose grandfather’s land in Roxbury was also taken by eminent domain before the boulevard was built.

That follows patterns seen in cities across the United States. Heat islands (and less tree cover) tend to be in communities of color or low-income areas. And that is often tied to the historical practice of redlining in which Black Americans were systematically denied services and financial assistance. 

Those same communities, says Vivek Shandas, research director for the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University in Oregon, were also where cities often focused their infrastructure projects following World War II. “Those low-rent neighborhoods would be the places where the big factories went in, the big roads would go in, the massive concrete, asphalt … the things that just seal up the ground,” he says. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Trees bordering Melnea Cass Boulevard in Boston wear ribbons to indicate that they are scheduled to be either cut down or have their roots cut so the road can be widened and bike paths added, on Oct. 14, 2020. The effort to rally opposition to the plan paid off in January as the city pledged to start the planning process over, with residents involved.

Concerned about what would happen to their neighborhood greenery, Ms. Lalyre, Ms. Robinson, and some other neighbors have built an organization called “Friends of Melnea Cass” to petition the city for a revision of the plans. There were meetings and protests, letters to city councilors, a social media hashtag, and a 13,000-signature petition. After seeing how many trees were set to be cut in blueprints last summer, Ms. Lalyre decided to make their plight more visible. She scavenged old bed sheets and ribbon from neighbors to cut into strips to tie around the trees that were to meet an ill fate during the planned construction.

Their efforts paid off. In late January, Boston city officials announced they would scrap the plans and start anew – this time with residents involved in the planning from the beginning. 

“We’ve hit the reset button,” says Vineet Gupta, director of policy and planning for the Boston Transportation Department. “It’s not the end of the project, but really a new beginning.”

“We’re elated,” Ms. Lalyre says. “We were just thinking that nothing could be done, that it was a done thing.”

Building cities with inclusive values

That outcome may be a glimmer of hope that tree canopy is rising in importance as cities design the urban landscapes of the future. 

“It’s not that we don’t value trees or green space, it’s that we’re not articulating, we’re not surfacing that value,” Dr. Shandas says. His research surveys are “unequivocal,” he says. “People really love trees,” whoever they are.

Researchers like Mr. O’Neil-Dunne and nonprofit organizations like American Forests are working to build the tools to turn that value into action. The first step, they say, is to map tree canopy so that decision-makers and other leaders can quantify the issue and compare the distribution of the urban forest to other data, like income inequality or air pollution. And, Mr. O’Neil-Dunne says, more cities – including Boston – are commissioning those studies. Boston, in fact, is developing an “urban forest” plan to establish and achieve citywide goals for tree canopy.

American Forests is taking it a step further and creating a “tree equity score” for urban areas across the nation to measure whether a neighborhood has enough trees so that all its residents experience the health, economic, and other benefits that trees provide. 

“If we think that everyone deserves a right to clean air and clean water – these are bedrocks of our federal environmental movement – trees are a massive part of that,” says Chris David, vice president of data science at American Forests. 

But city officials going into neighborhoods and planting trees all over the place won’t necessarily be healing, says Mayra Rodriguez-Gonzalez, a Ph.D. candidate in urban and social ecology in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University. The process needs to start with leaders listening to community members to understand what their needs are. Do they need trees for shade? Or community gardens for fresh food? Or perhaps a green gathering space? Where should those trees go?

Furthermore, Ms. Rodriguez-Gonzalez says, these communities may associate green spaces with gentrification and fear that it is an effort to improve the neighborhood by someone else’s standards and push them out. So including the community members in those discussions could allay those fears.

“So many good ideas”

“There’s a lot of distrust with municipalities coming in with a program or a project without active engagement in the community,” says Dr. Shandas. 

“Communities have been so impacted by decisions that have been made in city hall for generations,” he says. “As virtuous as putting green things into a neighborhood might sound, it still has echoes of the same concern that we are being done to rather than engaged with.”

With Boston officials committing to including the Roxbury community in the planning for the revision of the Melnea Cass Boulevard project, Ms. Lalyre and the rest of the Friends of Melnea Cass have turned their attention to generating their own concepts for the project.

“It’s amazing when you start talking to people how you can get so many good ideas,” she says. Now the group is working on their vision of the boulevard as a greenway. 

“We have a big job ahead.” Ms. Lalyre says. She sings a snippet of a song by the Carpenters; “We’ve only just begun.”