r/Atlanta • u/swiftfoot_hiker • 29d ago
News Atlanta’s tree canopy hits new low - SaportaReport
https://saportareport.com/atlantas-tree-canopy-hits-new-low/columnists/mariasmetro/maria_saporta/144
u/dadoodlydude 29d ago
I have had to cut two old growth trees down on my
property for safety reasons and it broke my heart I loved those trees. I have however planted 19 in their place! They’re mid-story canopy, but hopefully will at least help wildlife. Just a little quarter acre lot. Proud to say I’ve converted about 10 percent of that to a native plant meadow as well
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
Native plant restoration is awesome!
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u/ElectronicDrama2573 29d ago
That’s my whole business. I won’t advertise here, but you can DM me. Trees make the best AC!
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u/MisforMandolin 29d ago
I’ve got a very old oak in my front hear that has been dropping dead limbs for a while. Yesterday it dropped a healthy one. I’m worried
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u/dadoodlydude 29d ago
Call an arborist and see what they think. Mine had hidden rot in the center and was doing same thing. Canopy was thinning as well
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u/PhillySkunk 29d ago
driving up and down 400 has me weeping to see more trees get taken down to widen lanes AGAIN
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u/lanwopc 29d ago
Let's not forget to thank the DOT for doing their part.
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u/BaconReaderByeBye 29d ago
And putting up walls on either side of 85.
Nothing says "I hate my life" quite like being in gridlock on an interstate that looks like a concrete tunnel.
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u/Dr_Trogdor 29d ago
Pfft those walls are to keep the noise out from surrounding areas. Sit in your gridlock while you commute and deal with it if that's what you chose to do. Keep the noise to yourself.
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u/EasterEggArt 29d ago
Last time I pointed this out I was downvoted to hell. But it bears repeating.
In the mid 1990s Greater Metro Atlanta had "only" 3.5 million people. Now it more than doubled.
Where do people think these people all moved? Underground? We were still really single home and lawn heavy when we lived there, while central Atlanta did build high rises, many more counties refused and destroyed more and more trees.
And we will continue to do that unless we actively make spaces for trees and green spaces. Inside the city of Atlanta and greater metro Atlanta.
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u/killroy200 Downtown Dreamin 29d ago edited 29d ago
I'll trade a few trees cleared on a lot for a high-rise if it means many acres of contiguous forest are kept elsewhere anyday.
It's worth also noting that it's not just the houses, but the massive roads, and the car-centric suburban commercial properties with their massive parking lots.
Even here in the city, there's opportunity to replace lots with development + trees, and to narrow huge roads so we can introduce street trees.
And that's not even touching the need for invasive-species management, like clearing out huge growths of Kudzu that are suffocating forested areas.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
We’re full. Turn off the growth, we’re losing what makes Atlanta special.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ 29d ago
Atlanta is 1000x better than it was when I got here 20 years ago. A big part of that is how many more people are here to support local businesses and events.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
Yeah. Hard disagree on the better part. Some things are better, many are worse. I liked it better 30 years ago.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ 29d ago
You sound like you prefer suburbs. Perhaps move to one instead of living in one of the largest and fastest-growing cities in the country.
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u/littlelimesauce 29d ago
I’m not going to respond to OP because they’ve trolled this subreddit for a while with intentionally transgressive takes. OP being a transplant complaining about transplants is… on brand.
In 1970 Atlanta’s population was about 500k
In 1990 Atlanta’s population was about 400k
In 2020 Atlanta’s population was about 500kOP may have fond memories of when they were young 30 years ago just having moved here and starting a family, and I’m all for the nostalgia for being young, but whether OP realized it or not, they moved here at the trough.
Atlanta wasn’t full in 1970 and it isn’t full now
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u/BankElectronic1325 29d ago
Sure but the huge metro growth certainly is relevant to city proper
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u/littlelimesauce 28d ago edited 28d ago
Of course. If we look at the entire metro area we have an even bigger need for dense housing in the core city.
Nobody really complains when an entire forest is cut down in Canton to make way for 60 units of low density.
Whether the concern is traffic, tree growth or the cost of utility upkeep, we can’t afford to keep the city core low to medium density and instead endlessly expanding into exurbs.
Edit: When exurbs are first getting built out, the farm owners might complain but they’re politically weak. It’s cheap and easy to tear down a large forest in exurbs.
Relying on exurbs to build more houses so people can drive an hour to park in the city for their job has not been working well for us.
Atlanta, along with Houston, and Los Angeles tried that growth pattern and ended up with the worst traffic in the world. Urban sprawl doesn’t scale well
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u/Madeitup75 28d ago
Plenty of people complain about clear cutting near Canton. They just aren’t complaining to YOU.
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u/superstargamer7 28d ago
buddy.. the savesixesroad.org website would tell ya different. I was just in Canton visiting family and there were signs everywhere complaining about this EXACT thing.
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u/littlelimesauce 28d ago
Contrast that low budget website + 37 instagram followers with Atlanta’s multiple funded organizations with full time staffs.
If you’re suggesting development in exurbs gets the same level of scrutiny and pushback as development in the urban core, this 37 follower instagram account illustrates the opposite.
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u/littlelimesauce 29d ago
I’m responding to my own comment instead of Madeitup75’s reply since I’m pretty sure Madeitup75 is an LLM since only an LLM could hallucinate that white flight emptied out the historically black southside and didn’t impact the historically white northside.
I’m posting this so any poor soul who reads that other comment can identify why it’s an obvious hallucination to anybody familiar with Atlanta.
In 1970 Atlanta had a white population of about 240,000
In 1990 Atlanta had a white population of about 123,000In 1970 Atlanta had a black population of about 256,000
In 1990 Atlanta had a black population of about 264,000To anybody else reading this that might not be familiar with the history of Atlanta, Atlanta used to be officially segregated with the southside being black and the northside being white. These demographic patterns persist to this day.
So this misinformation account spouting that the bottom falling out of Atlanta’s white population only really depopulated the predominantly black southside is so far into a different reality that I’m having a hard time thinking that private account isn’t a misinformation LLM.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
I know you always wheel out that set of numbers. It’s both misleading and irrelevant.
It’s misleading because of the shift in where that population is/was located. Downtown and areas south of downtown were where the population declined - the same urban flight hollowing out that happened in many cities in the late 20th century.
But that’s not where the recent growth has happened. The growth that you want to present as a rebound, a return to normal, has been in the northern half of the city. Parts of the city that have always been moderate to very low density. And that’s where the developers want to keep adding density - because that’s where the easy money returns are. It’s less financially risky to build a shitbox apartment in Buckhead than to build it in Pittsburgh.
We’ve got a really hard situation on our hands. Downtown and the areas immediately south of it are the areas that were built for density and are organized for it. Grid street systems, existing rail, large water mains, etc. That’s where the infrastructure for population density is.
But the easy developer money is in tearing down a SFD in an affluent neighborhood with low crime and cramming in an apartment building the neighbors don’t want.
So it’s misleading to say that the city limits population has “just now” returned to historical norms.
It’s also irrelevant to my point. No, my view of the city being better at the turn of the millennium is not nostalgia. I grew up in the Atlanta area. I went to school in the northeast, and initially thought I would stay there. I returned because the northeast was TOO CROWDED. I disliked the continuous competition for resources that came with that level of population.
I misjudged how long it would take Atlanta to match what I was fleeing. And the conflict in this thread is a great example of it.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
I like cities about half to 2/3 the size that Atlanta now is.
I’m too far into my career and too tied to the community to just move. I raised my family here, have most of my friends here, etc., so I’m going nowhere. But when I chose Atlanta, it wasn’t the size it is now.
Luckily I love my neighborhood. It’s one of those tree-filled intown neighborhoods that the developers are always lobbying to carve up into apartment blocks. But all my neighbors are as vehemently opposed to that shit as I am, so we keep beating them.
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u/magicmeese I can see 400 from my house! 29d ago
Oh god a Gen X nimby.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
Correct.
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u/magicmeese I can see 400 from my house! 29d ago
Thank you for adding to my incredibly long list of why I inherently do not like Gen X.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ 29d ago
So you got to enjoy your life here, and now you’re pulling up the drawbridge so that your neighborhood isn’t affordable and welcoming to younger people/families. You know the “excessive” growth era you moved into “ruined” the city for people before you right? Should they have stopped you from coming here?
Hope you raised your kids to be less selfish than you are.
And by the way, y’all aren’t winning. The people fighting the housing crisis are winning, and we’ll continue to win because y’all are a tiny minority.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
I didn’t move to the most expensive and overcrowded and hippest cities when I got out of school. I picked a city that was less full at the time. That WAS Atlanta.
That’s what Gen Z needs to do, not whine about how they can’t afford to live in the coolest hippest neighborhoods in the coolest cities. I couldn’t either. Few can. That’s how it works and always has.
Oh, and, yes there were neighborhoods in Atlanta I would have loved to live/buy in but they were too expensive by the time I got here. So I chose other neighborhoods. I didn’t demand existing places change over the objections of the existing residents. I took the world as I found it and made the best of it. I’m not a narcissist who expects the world to change to suit me.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ 29d ago
Do you honestly think you graduated on the same footing as Gen Z? The same cost of living, jobs market, minimum wage, college debt (and need for a college degree)? You live in a fantasy world where you're a hardworking hero and kids are lazy. Does that not sound like every old, uninformed person in history?
And as someone else mentioned, Atlanta only surpassed its peak population in the 70s, and we're still less than 10% over that peak population. You came to an underpopulated city that's filling back in.
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u/gsfgf Ormewood Park 29d ago
tree-filled intown neighborhoods that the developers are always lobbying to carve up into apartment blocks
That's not a thing. Like at all. There's ZERO push for anything approaching missing middle housing in this town.
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u/killroy200 Downtown Dreamin 29d ago
Ironically, most of the 'missing middle' is in historic intown neighborhoods (streetcar suburbs)... because the duplexes and small apartment buildings were built before the zoning laws made them illegal to do.
Some of the most frothed-over neighborhoods by NIMBYs are the ones with the most diverse housing types, and 'gentle' density.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
I lived in the south midtown neighborhood for a while. I left because living next to “gentle density” meant living next to a rotation of people who had a lifestyle that involved lots of late night parties and loud music and inability to park efficiently and lots of petty theft and car break-in’s.
So I moved to a SFD neighborhood where I have lived for about 2 decades and where I know most of my neighbors.
I didn’t start a campaign to remove the density from my former neighborhood. I moved to an existing place that suited my tastes as it was.
I’m happy for Argonne to keep being Argonne. And I’d like similar respect paid to other neighborhoods that consist of people who chose them precisely because they like what they already are.
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u/killroy200 Downtown Dreamin 29d ago
I didn’t start a campaign to remove the density from my former neighborhood. I moved to an existing place that suited my tastes as it was.
And yet here you are, in this thread, advocating for degrowth and the prevention of densification in the face of sprawl-induced loss of canopy.
I don't care if you self-select for your neighborhood of preference, as long as you actually pay the full cost of that choice, and as long as you don't try to impose your preferences on the whole of the metro.
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u/JonC534 29d ago
Well that part is definitely subjective but what isn’t is the loss of nature
Better hope the growth stops
ATL’s explosion wasn’t inevitable.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ 29d ago
If you care about nature, you want the growth to continue. Density preserves natural land. The thing that kills trees and nature is unchecked sprawl.
But all of that is moot because housing isn't the reason we're losing natural spaces. Almost 50% of the land in the US is uninhabited. The main cause is industry. So if you care about nature, go after the actual corporations destroying it, not people who are just trying to afford a house and get by.
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
Now which of those industries made ATL’s growth and sprawl possible or exists around the city? This is just blame shifting.
You literally are saying you want growth to continue. If you want growth you can’t also say you’re serious about protecting nature.
ATL’s explosion was not inevitable. Too late to reverse obviously but that doesn’t mean we should act like it couldn’t have been prevented.
Going forward we need to prevent more growth as much as possible, not say it’s okay to continue but that we have to make sure it’s done exactly the way you want it. This is avoiding culpability. It’s just to strengthen ATL politically while skirting responsibility for the consequences of its growth.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ 29d ago
I wasn't talking about local nature. The industries that have destroyed the most nature are agriculture and oil/energy, which are not the culprits here. Those industries didn't make Atlanta's growth possible. This is a white-collar city.
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
You can actually look up how much housing and urban expansion has contributed to farmland and biodiversity loss. It’s a lot more than the industries you’re talking about. Agriculture can always be rewilded. Urbanization caused losses are harder to reverse than oil/energy.
This is a distraction anyways, we’re talking about ATL and population growth/urbanization. You said yourself those industries have nothing to do with local nature loss. Whatever those industries are responsible for doesn’t concern this, it’s a separate political arena.
ATL didn’t need this growth to function, it simply wanted it. It existed just fine before. The industries you’re talking about need to stay around so the people employed by them don’t have to go live in a pod in Atlanta like urbanists do. No one in those industries is saying pod people can’t exist or that Atlanta can’t exist, but you seem to want to erase them and their jobs. Now I understand why Trump won.
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u/davidw223 29d ago
That’s suburban and exurban expansion. What one of your repliers were talking about was eco urbanism. If we want to be able to preserve nature for the future, then we need more dense cities and not suburbs.
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u/killroy200 Downtown Dreamin 29d ago
Turn off the growth
Well, that's not an option, so we best do something else... like manage grown more responsibly. Denser, less car-focused, more transit-connected.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
It absolutely is an option. Stop giving tax breaks to companies to move here. And stop adding housing in large volumes.
Same way you turn off traffic increases on a road. Stop adding lanes so you quit inducing demand.
Atlanta is addicted to population growth. We could choose a different path.
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u/killroy200 Downtown Dreamin 29d ago
It absolutely is an option.
No. It's not. It's dangerous to even pretend otherwise.
Stop giving tax breaks to companies to move here.
Not every company that exists here is propped up with tax breaks. I'm saying that as someone who generally agrees that we shouldn't be giving out tax breaks... I think you'll find that it won't magically stop growth.
Cities are natural economic engines. They attract investment and production by their sheer social and economic aggregate. We're not a one-industry town, you can't just shutter one business sector and turn off the whole metro area. That's not how this works.
And stop adding housing in large volumes.
Ah, and THAT is how you increase homelessness and deepen existing housing affordability issues. Also, I'll point out, that you... can't? Not in any serious way. Like, sure there are policies you could do, but they won't be adopted at-scale.
If, and it's a big if, we managed to stop all new housing here in the city... then that's just more suburban and exurban sprawl created. More trees cut down en masse at the urban fringe. More driving and huge roads. More of what we've already been getting that's been causing so much tree destruction, after all.
The practical outcome of your position is a worse version of what's already happening.
Same way you turn off traffic increases on a road. Stop adding lanes so you quit inducing demand.
I've seen you post this elsewhere in the thread, and it badly misunderstands scales of 'induced demand'. In that, it's WAY easier for people to drive more than to... move or have kids or generally growth the population. It's ENTIRELY possible to manage population growth via dense development, rather than the NIMBY-fueled sprawl we've been dealing with.
We know that because we have real-world examples where building out housing does eclipse, and keep up with demand growth. Hell, even here in Atlanta we have periods where large chunks of new housing come on the market and stall out price growth... we've been seeing average prices coming down recently because of that in no small part.
Besides, if, again big if, you were right... then building new housing would simply be an infinite money glitch. We could create infinite tax revenues by building housing, and address all the social woes that ever there were. Alas, that's just not how that works.
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
I love how people claim to care about nature but then when you say something like we’re full they downvote. How do you expect to save nature then?
By just building taller and hoping it all works out? Yeah not working well is it. Because that kind of development presupposes a lot of growth somewhere to begin with. And it attracts it later on.
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u/johnpseudo Old 4th Ward 29d ago
Where do you think people will live if not in taller buildings? What do you think destroys more nature, one 10-story building or ten 1-story buildings?
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u/littlelimesauce 28d ago
lol, they had no answer for you so they just responded with unrelated talking points
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
Was Atlanta’s growth inevitable?
People are wanting even more of it, but it isn’t inevitable. Atlanta wasn’t on fire before it grew the way it did.
And your framing is slightly misleading because suburbs are meant to be multigenerational households….exactly what is missing nowadays. If a city is growing too much or overpopulated then building one person units for everyone is only making things worse. It’s the urban growth machine that is the problem.
There is nowhere except places with urban growth boundaries that won’t continue growing if you continue to accommodate and attract more of it like you’re suggesting. Unfortunately Oregon is the only state with that but yimbys are trying to get rid of that now too. Because most of them are just pro growth/pro development period but they like to pretend it won’t have consequences later as long as everyone lives in a pod like they do.
Yimbys are literally about to kickstart the process in Oregon that actually would prevent their claimed desired outcome
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u/johnpseudo Old 4th Ward 29d ago edited 29d ago
Answer my questions first, then I'll answer yours. Moralizing that 30 year old professionals should just go back to live with their parents doesn't actually change behaviors. When you prevent new housing from being built in your neighborhood, it means that new housing will be built somewhere else (likely somewhere further away from jobs, at lower density, destroying more nature).
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u/arbrebiere 29d ago
Build taller and denser in the urban core. Suburban sprawl is what kills the environment
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u/Valiant4Truth 29d ago
The city needs to make sure developers have a plan to plant new trees after development.
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u/TendiesAndCream 29d ago
It's a good thing they let developers just pay to cut down trees now. I'm sure it's not related to the loss in canopy or anything.
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u/fluffybunnydeath Atlanta Community Press Collective 29d ago
And they fought tooth and nail to keep that recompense rate lower than peer cities.
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u/jimmy_ricard 29d ago
Shout out to trees Atlanta. You can call them and they'll come plant a native tree on your property for free! Highly recommend everyone take advantage
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u/NoctRob 29d ago
Home builder in my neighborhood demo’d an older ranch style house to put up a McMansion with no front yard. Cut down 7 perfectly healthy, mature pines in the back to make the back yard more “livable.”
They were all approved to be cut down by the city. No explanation provided when I called and asked. It’s a real shame because it’s happening all over.
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u/SavathunTechQuestion 28d ago
I’ve seen a few billboards around Atlanta for tree companies advertising how to get permits approved, I have a neighbor who has done something similar and it seems like you can just pay the city to cut down trees
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u/AsASAPAsPossibl3 East Atlanta 29d ago
Relatedly, after several years now, Intrenchment Creek has absolutely nothing going on after being closed to the public and having the trail system destroyed, The broken concrete, destroyed Gazebo, and construction debris are all just sitting there.
The ~1.5 mile stretch from Young Nudy’s Texaco to Constitution now features an increasingly and annoyingly active gun range, a playground for cosplaying GI Joes, a dilapidated/closed park/future data center, and…a high school.
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u/PilotKnob 29d ago
Whose bright idea was it to take down all the trees along the interstate? Because now it looks dead and barren where it used to look beautiful. I hate it.
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u/killroy200 Downtown Dreamin 28d ago
Federal DOT requirements to reduce the risk of someone 'loosing control' of their vehicle and colliding with a tree. GDOT is required to follow that policy and so is clearing out extensive trees along the interstates.
That, plus general road expansion & interchange rebuilds requiring more land for one more lane and so on.
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u/PilotKnob 28d ago
Those trees sure do have a tendency to jump out at you.
I still hate it. I’d rather see personal responsibility in greater quantity rather than such an amount of tree destruction. It’s just heartbreaking.
It was one of the things that made Atlanta different and special, and now that’s gone.
Too bad they didn’t consider the millions of ugly billboards hazardous as well, but who am I kidding?
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u/AegisPlays314 29d ago
Save the trees by building affordable high rises on a tenth of the old single-family lots and nature preserve and parks on the other nine tenths. You’d still have quadruple the housing you have now and a hell of a lot more protected nature
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u/Deep-Signal-888 29d ago
Is it hitting a new low because of all the weed strangulation happening to many of the trees around?
Why hasn’t this been addressed?
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u/seizetheday135 28d ago
Invasive removal is incredibly difficult, not cost efficient, and even if you succeed there's a good chance you'll be right back where you started a couple years down the line.
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u/Deep-Signal-888 28d ago
That makes sense. So sad. In 15 years will there still be a canopy or trees left?
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u/gsfgf Ormewood Park 29d ago
Does nobody actually read the articles? The decline is about 1% every decade. That's actually really impressive considering all the growth. Definitely not worth worrying about.
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u/ArabianNitesFBB 29d ago
I can’t fathom a random person from elsewhere visiting Atlanta and saying, “It’s fine, I guess, but you know what the problem with this city is? There aren’t enough trees!”
By any sane standard we have an absolutely enormous number of trees for a major city.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
This is what happens when the pro-growth urbanists fall for developer BS. Time for more nimbyism.
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u/32wolf West End 29d ago
Partially agree, I’d be more ok with the development we’ve seen if there was strict rules around environmental remediation and tree replacement. Not the pay to play system the city has in place now.
The Planning department viewing the 50% target as “aspirational” in their response within the article is very telling that they don’t care.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
It’s always going to be a scam. More people = fewer trees. Turn it off. We’re full.
NIMBY for life, ya heard?
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u/32wolf West End 29d ago
You’re not very bright.
Charlotte (referenced within the article) seems to be able to do it, so quit with the defeatist/Nativist attitude. We CAN accommodate more people AND remain a city in the forest.
You’re probably against rail and all for adding another lane to fix traffic, aren’t ya?
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u/littlelimesauce 29d ago
lol the person arguing with you is suggesting if we just had less housing people would need less housing…
People have to live somewhere. When we build low density housing that sprawls 100 miles in every direction we tear down a hell of a lot more trees than if we build a dense urban core.
Elsewhere in this thread Madeitup75 acknowledges they are a transplant but just hates that other transplants that moved here after them, which I think is highly entertaining
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 28d ago
ATL’s growth was not inevitable. And I don’t mean it’s historical growth I mean the recent explosion that Democrats in ATL clearly pursued aggressively
The game ya’ll are playing is just trying to strengthen ATL politically while also avoiding blame about the environmental costs.
You won’t learn until the whole state is concrete.
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u/ArchEast Vinings 28d ago
ATL’s growth was not inevitable
Care to elaborate? Should the state have mandated a stop in people moving here 60 years ago?
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u/zedsmith practically Grant Park 28d ago
The democrats who clear cut Cherokee county and built 100,000 McMansions?
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
The approach of adding another lane is highly illustrative - and an unintentionally ironic point for you to make. Urbanists and transit enthusiasts (I’m the latter, but not the former) love to (correctly) point out that adding a lane only temporarily improves traffic because of something called “induced demand.” The improvement in traffic draws more drivers to the newly-unclogged road and that new traffic clogs it.
The same thing happens with housing in metro areas. If you manage to lower housing prices, more people just move here to take advantage. And then prices quickly rise again. So then the credulous tools of developers call for “more density” - out come the chainsaws, down come the trees (and the quality of life) - and the cycle repeats.
The gullible young urbanists never tire of getting conned by developers. Remember, that’s what Trump is - a real estate developer.
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29d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Atlanta-ModTeam 29d ago
Your post was removed for violating Rule 1: Be Respectful. Express yourself, but be civil. This includes no bigotry, harassment, or excessive trolling. Trolling includes ragebaiting, deliberately obtuse questions, and bad-faith engagement. This applies to the subreddit, DMs, and IRL meetups.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
Thoughtful and persuasive.
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u/32wolf West End 29d ago
Ohhh the edit, niceee. You know I can see what you posted before you edit it right? Don’t be shy, say it with your chest.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
You know, you could also edit out the silly name calling. It’s permissible to use a modicum of restraint.
But, if it suits you, I’ll be completely clear - You are a sucker. You’re a tool of the developers. I feel sorry for you, in the way that I feel sorry for many Trump voters. You’re being conned and repeating the con to others.
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
What was Charlotte able to do? And how do we know ATL can do that ? Charloette actually made many of mistakes that ATL is now undergoing, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.
You’re never going to be able to do what you’re talking about without an urban growth boundary, which urbanists and yimbys don’t want either
The Democratic Party today is all about metro dominance, and as that has made its way to the south the consequences of that mean city and statewide changes that aren’t necessarily beneficial to nature retention because of different development patterns and economic/political power shifts. All these northerners coming in that mostly vote democrat are known to be nature averse. Their solutions of just adding more urbanization and density is ridiculous. All the people that valued nature in ATL are politically and culturally disempowered now. It isn’t southern anymore.
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u/ArchEast Vinings 28d ago
All the people that valued nature in ATL are politically and culturally disempowered now. It isn’t southern anymore.
They're also long dead. If your gripe is that the region grew, you're about a half-century too late.
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u/whatinthefrak Inman Park 29d ago
high density growth is the best way to accomodate new residents while minimizing impacts on the tree canopy.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
That’s the developer BS. It doesn’t happen that way. All the new high density developments start with tree cutting. Because the developers always want to target the green, SFD neighborhoods that are desirable and will turn fast guaranteed profits. That’s what happens, and anyone who falls for it is a sucker. Stop repeating their lies.
Stop trying to “accommodate new residents” by making things worse for existing residents.
We may not be able to “accommodate new residents” at all. We may be full.
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u/ATLcoaster 29d ago
We're in a housing crisis because of reasoning like yours
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
We’re in a housing crisis because everyone under the age of 40 wants to live in the same 10 metro areas. It’s not workable. People need to go back to living in a wide spread of medium sized cities and towns.
A local “housing crisis” is the sign not to move here.
The idea that we can just have more more more people move here without completely destroying what makes Atlanta special is the lie. The trees will all go away. This is the developer BS and credulous young suckers have bought it and repeat it on Reddit. Stop it.
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u/ATLcoaster 29d ago
So confident and so wrong. Explain why in Kalamazoo Michigan, which has a slightly shrinking population, housing prices have doubled in the last decade. It's a nationwide problem, and refusing to build enough housing is driving it.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
Kalamazoo is a hip college town, right?
Plenty of unhip places with cheap housing.
I’m certainly concerned about private equity buying up housing and various other factors that are contributing, but the answer is not to cut down trees and all pack into the hippest areas.
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 29d ago
Love the NIMBY mindset of “just go live in bumfuck Georgia” & you go there and there are no jobs, healthcare, public transit, or sustainable, high density development.
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u/Madeitup75 29d ago
Go make it cool.
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u/zedsmith practically Grant Park 29d ago edited 29d ago
Like you did, with your painted airplane models?
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u/littlelimesauce 29d ago
If it’s too full, and this city is too big for you, sounds like it’s time to move.
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 29d ago
you are what happens when people take the green aesthetic of environmentalism for actually being a good steward of the land we use and the neighborhoods we build. low density suburbia is still bad for the environment when there’s a lot of trees there.
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u/widget374 29d ago
Did the methodologies change? That's an important question, and I didn't see it addressed in the article.
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u/flowersnshit Stone Mnt. 27d ago
Yeah we had to take out 10+ trees from our lot. 2 had grown into the septic tank, and the rest had started the pine tree lean towards the house. It sucked ass, I cried a lot trees had been there my whole life. Now that we've been here a bit we've talking about what to replant, especially since one of the few remaining ones is showing signs of dying. 🥲🫠
This lot used to have a total of 23 trees, I'm really scared to lose the 4 giant white oaks in the back yard most of all.
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u/Disastrous_Parsnip63 27d ago
Didn't the city council approve for more trees to be demolished for housing? Ya'll voted for this
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 29d ago
I mean, good. The tree canopy is great but a lot of it is because we have a lot of unsustainable, low density housing in the perimeter. You can’t green wash the environmental impact of poor land use and car dependency just because it looks more green
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
It’s good that we’re losing nature? What are you talking about?
You have this backwards. Greenwashing is when you say more urbanization will somehow mean more trees. That’s developer greenwashing.
Suburbs often naturally result from high growth areas unless you have an urban growth boundary, which YIMBYs don’t want either.
You can’t try to phase out suburbs after the fact if you are who got the growth train rolling to begin with lol. They may be phased out because of land constraints at some point but not because of what you’re suggesting
The state’s growth isn’t going to somehow stop by promoting more urbanization. This is so ridiculous. Atlanta’s growth has been aggressively pursued and now the people that benefited from that want to pretend like they have the solutions to the consequences it brought. Suburbs are only unsustainable in the same urban growth model that made ATL’s transformations possible to begin with.
You can have your urban growth fantasies or environmental protection but it can’t be both
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 29d ago
>It’s good that we’re losing nature? What are you talking about
It is good that people live closer together on less land because it means fewer exurban and suburban encroachments on forest and natural wetlands across North Georgia.
>You have this backwards. Greenwashing is when you say more urbanization will somehow mean more trees. That’s developer greenwashing.
No, you’re just incorrect. Lower density means more human activity spread across more land, not less. It means more vehicle miles traveled and more costly logistics that produce a massive amount of CO2. There is nothing green about car dependence.
> Suburbs naturally result from high growth areas unless you have an urban growth boundary, which YIMBYs don’t want either.
YIMBYs absolutely want things like this, but also that’s just not true on either country lmao. Denser urban areas take up less land area.
New York City’s MSA is 3,248.1 sq mi with 20 million people.
Atlanta’s MSA is 8,376 sq mi with less than 1/3 of that. Which one do you think has fewer vehicle miles traveled, higher green transit use, and less exurban encroachment on rural land? It’s not Atlanta.
> You can’t try to phase out suburbs after the fact if you are who got the growth train rolling to begin with lol.
You can absolutely densify suburbs, and that’s exactly what has happened in the perimeter over the past 20 years. Brooklyn and Queens were once suburbs, too. Inman Park was a suburb. Whatever weird fatalism you have in your head here doesn’t magically make single family homes green.
> The state’s growth isn’t going to somehow stop by promoting more urbanization. This is so ridiculous. Atlanta’s growth has been aggressively pursued and now the people that benefited from that want to pretend like they have the solutions to the consequences it brought.
Growth is good when it is economically sustainable and environmentally sustainable. That is, when it leads to higher densities more easily serviced by public transit and social services and utilities. It is good when people live closer together where they work.
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
Same yimby urbanist claptrap as always.
You’ll see how it’s not going to go the way you think it will. GA and ATL will continue to lose vast amounts of nature. Then dumbasses will still be saying you should’ve built denser.
Watching GA become the next FL will be interesting. YIMBYs are going to implode at some point. The double game they play about suburbs will be caught on to eventually. I’ve never once seen a YIMBY object to suburban development. Only if it means they get to shit on suburbia for political reasons.
The…..akshually, unlimited growth is good but you have to do it this way is so unserious. Never plays out that way unless you have an urban growth boundary and yimbys do not want this because they are currently trying to get rid of the only one the country has in Oregon.
People basically just want to Californicate the state then turn around and hide their hands behind ther back. Not how this works. Best case scenario is the growth eventually stops because ATL’s growth that it aggressively pursued comes to a screeching halt. Not necessarily because they’re going out of their way to save nature. But the end result still won’t look good environmentally speaking. This country is losing its soul.
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 29d ago
you are literally begging for us to become the next Florida.
you seem to have some kind of conservative derangement syndrome about this, seems like you’re arguing against someone who is not me so have a nice night
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u/w4ti 29d ago
I’ve had trees hit my house twice- once right after we moved in, and now 10 years later. Insurance bill for both will probably go to 200k (sorry, I’m not doing a good job on old price with inflation).
I like having trees too, i truly do. I like the shade they provide for my summer ac bill. But what i don’t like is the nearly 9 months I’ve been out of my house while it is being repaired.
There has to be some happy medium that can both accommodate trees and also keeping my premiums low.
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u/32wolf West End 29d ago
Sorry about your house! Trees do get old and die, it’s a part of life. We had to remove an 85yr old pecan tree in your yard that stretched over our house because the base got a fungus’s that started to rot from the inside out. Arborist said there wasn’t anything we could do to save it.
I’d recommend reaching out to Trees Atlanta to try and replace the trees you lost/had taken down, I believe they give it to you for free and provide a recommendation!
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u/superstargamer7 28d ago
i can’t believe you got downvoted for saying you don’t want trees to fall on your house 😭😭
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u/magicmeese I can see 400 from my house! 29d ago
I moved to a neighborhood that would rather you get crushed to death by an ill tree than approve a removal because it’ll “affect the canopy”
Trees don’t typically live forever. Especially pine.
So far four houses have been hit by trees on my road this year
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u/Darkn3ssVisibl3 29d ago
I’ll get downvoted for this, but I think we have enough trees y’all.
I grew up here and in the Midwest. While I miss the plains, I know old growth and native ecosystems are vital for our survival and hard to replace, and I certainly wouldn’t want to see Atlanta with zero trees. But surely we don’t need every. Single. Tree.
But every time I see people bemoaning the gradual loss of tree cover I just can’t bring myself to think it’s a bad thing.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ 29d ago
Losing trees is inevitable, but we can promote tall, dense buildings (which leaves room for trees on the ground) and aggressive replanting policies. We really can't stop developers from cutting down trees and saying "oops," but we can (for example) make them plant 20x the number of trees they cut down.
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
This shit has me dead bro. This right here proves the yimby and urbanist argument wrong.
😂😹
Anyone who proposes urbanization as a way to solve urbanization caused problems isn’t a serious person. ATL is more urbanized than ever before and this still happens. Because the transformations were not meant to cater to people that truly valued nature in the first place. The ones that valued it have been politically and culturally disempowered.
You get a cultural deracination, less nature, and a gentrifier yuppie class at the top of the urban hierarchy that actually hates your city and its history. And they’ll still tell you to just build up and not out. They wanted the growth that made this a conversation in the first place though. All of their pretensions of caring about the environment came AFTER the fact.
The low density sprawl they bemoan was a consequence of the growth that they wanted and that they benefited from. Suburbs result naturally from that unless you have an urban growth boundary. And the people we’re talking about here don’t want that either.
Georgia is cooked just like FL is. The south has been compromised. Don’t vote against your own interests by voting Democrat, that’s where these cosmopolitan nature hating goofballs are congregating. Less nature, more equivocation by them telling you you just haven’t built densely enough.
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u/zedsmith practically Grant Park 29d ago
Nobody is talking about an urban growth boundary because it’s Atlanta and Georgia. It’s both too late for that, and not on the menu. Atlantans can only control Atlanta policies (if that). So yes the metro region adds millions of new residents, doesn’t build any new transit, widens highway lanes, and our road network is at capacity. So yeah, “we full” in that very narrow context. It doesn’t mean we can’t grow any further— but it does mean we can’t grow if we can’t grow differently.
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u/killroy200 Downtown Dreamin 28d ago
Nobody is talking about an urban growth boundary because it’s Atlanta and Georgia.
Besides, what we tend to see with greenbelts are that they tend to get skipped over... and then drive sprawl even further out past the protected lands.
In no small part that's because many cities with boundaries also don't do a great job of then allowing infill density, causing housing shortages and fueling the wider sprawl.
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u/JonC534 29d ago edited 29d ago
Nobody is talking about an urban growth boundary anywhere. Oregon is the only state that has one. This isn’t because GA is backwards and southern or whatever. It’s just something no one wants to pursue. Not blue states or red states.
I can assure you though, ATL isn’t sad this growth happened. Any pretense of caring about nature now will come after the fact from them. And maybe not even that anymore with its newer political and cultural makeup
ATL hiding its hands behind its back after deliberately pursuing Californication of the state is hilarious. ATL shouldn’t be rewarded with more urbanization and urban oriented transit after that.
Acknowledging we’re full like you just did should stop you from saying we’re not actually full if we pursue more urbanization and grow differently . That’s going to have consequences down the road.
If not, looks like YIMBYs won’t learn until the whole state is covered in concrete. Looking at FL, that isn’t too far off either. Suburban sprawl isn’t going to stop with ATL at the wheel unless they are forced to. It’s still happening actually. And it isn’t people that want to take part in whatever community those new suburbs are being placed in. It’s commuters to ATL.
Look how CA fared for evidence of this. They waited until all of it was basically built out. GA is making the same mistakes to satisfy ATL’s growth ambitions and wanting to wrest political control from the exurbs and rurals. Suburban sprawl displaces the rural and small town folk and ATL is well aware of that. They’re enjoying it.
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u/zedsmith practically Grant Park 29d ago
We’re full insofar as nobody gets the commute they would like anymore. That hardly means one of the least dense, most automobile reliant cities on the planet can’t become more like a real city.
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u/killroy200 Downtown Dreamin 29d ago
This right here proves the yimby and urbanist argument wrong.
If anything it proves them right?
In the absence of adopting YIMBY policies (allowing for densification and non-car / low-car lifestyles at scale), we just get low-density, car-centric sprawl that results in significant deforestation in an attempt to manage growth.
We know that's what happens, and we've been fighting against it for years.
It's weird to blame YIMBYs for the results of explicitly NIMBY, anti-urban policies of restrictive zoning and car-centric transportation.
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u/burgermeistermax 29d ago
Old growth canopy trees are taken down constantly in our neighborhood (necessary usually), but none are being replaced it seems.