Legacies of past housing discrimination in the present-day urban forest of a moderate-sized US city

Abstract

Street trees are known to provide a variety of services to the public. Understanding the makeup of the street tree community, and therefore the extent of those services, requires a consideration of past policies that contributed to the patterns we see today. Inequities in environmental conditions in US cities, including access to street trees, has been shown to be a product of race-based federal policies such as the Federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), which graded communities in the 1930’s according to perceived levels of risk for mortgage lending. We used a 2021 tree inventory to examine whether a legacy of HOLC designations is still observable in the modern urban forest of Schenectady, NY (USA) by comparing the size, number, and diversity of trees within various HOLC grades. The lower-graded areas, C and D, had about half the number of trees as the higher-rated A- and B-graded areas. The trees in D-graded areas were also smaller and were the least taxonomically diverse. In recent years, however, tree plantings have disproportionately favored D-graded areas over A- and B-graded areas. Despite the progress, this study adds to the growing literature that the underprivileged neighborhoods, historically made up of people of color, are not receiving equivalent environmental benefits as wealthier areas. Identifying such patterns highlights the obligation to construct public policy approaches that target the inequities in urban forest conditions so that all residents benefit equally from the services that trees in urban environments provide.