Edgebrook is one of the leafiest neighborhoods in Chicago. Neighbors who live under 200-year-old oak trees reap the benefit of some of the coolest summers, cleanest air and highest residential property values in the city. 

Less than 20 miles to the south, the summer sun bears down on concrete stretches of Englewood without shade, made worse by empty lots that trap heat.

“If people … have to walk, if they're waiting for the bus, radiant heat is just beaming on them,” said Bweza Itaagi, an Englewood farmer who worked with city officials to add more trees to her community.

To try to fix those disparities, the city launched an unprecedented effort in 2022, prioritizing planting in neighborhoods like Englewood over Edgebrook, to address years of neglect on the South and West sides. 

Now, four years after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot vowed to plant 75,000 trees by 2027 under the initiative — dubbed Our Roots Chicago — city officials are on pace to reach the goal a year early, with tens of thousands of new trees going to neighborhoods that have been cited as especially vulnerable to heat, flooding and air pollution — all problems researchers say are made worse by too few trees in a neighborhood. 

The city’s tree-planting numbers tell a broad story of success. As of this spring, the top 10 wards that received the most trees since 2022 were on the South and West sides, according to an Illinois Answers Project analysis. Those wards alone received nearly 24,000 new trees during that time from the two city departments overseeing plantings — Streets and Sanitation, and Transportation. 

That’s a stark improvement over years past. For instance, from 2018 to 2021, nearly half of new trees — about 10,000 in total — were planted in North and Northwest side wards.

Still, a deeper dive into the data reveals the city’s most recent tree plantings have been uneven within the wards themselves, with some neighborhoods thick with trees still getting even more, while others with few trees are still shortchanged as city leaders struggle to plant trees where they are most needed. Between 2021 and 2025, the Streets and Sanitation department also removed more than 28,000 trees all across Chicago, mostly due to damage and disease.

Many census tracts in tree-sparse neighborhoods like Woodlawn, Armour Square and West Englewood saw one or two dozen plantings amid a paucity of requests while hundreds of trees went to wealthier, more politically engaged neighborhoods like Forest Glen, Norwood Park and Mount Greenwood.

The roughly square-mile area including Old Edgebrook and Wildwood received about 200 trees between April 2022 and December 2025 — more than 93.1% of the city’s other 800-plus census tracts — despite the fact that The Morton Arboretum ranked it as the lowest-priority tract in Chicago. A nearby tract, the 4th- lowest priority, received more than 89.7% of other tracts.

How did we calculate these numbers?

Our reporting team analyzed data from several city departments as well as information from the federal government and a tree-focused research center. The data on when and where trees were planted came from the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation and the Chicago Department of Transportation, the two agencies responsible for plantings under the Our Roots Chicago initiative. Data on 311 requests came directly from the city’s Open Data Portal. 

Our data on how much each part of the city needs trees — including data on existing tree canopy, environmental variables and social determinants of health — came from The Morton Arboretum’s Chicago Region Trees Initiative. 

Because city data was mostly organized by address, we calculated the physical location of each tree planting programmatically using geocoding services from the United States Census Bureau and Google, with a small number of locations — less than 0.5% — hand verified using various mapping tools from Google. 

From there, we used GeoPandas and other data science tools built in the Python programming language to map those physical locations onto census tracts, which is how Morton Arboretum organizes its data, as well as the city’s wards, community areas and neighborhoods. (Those mapping boundaries are from either the U.S. Census Bureau or directly from the city).

This allowed us to calculate averages, rankings and the other numbers you see throughout the story.

Officials noted that many of the trees planted in the Edgebrook area during that period replaced others that were uprooted during the summer 2024 derecho storm.

Many needy tracts received hundreds of trees, including some in Lawndale and Washington Park. But others received much less attention. 

A tract in West Garfield Park ranked by Morton as the 12th neediest tract in the city received just 20 trees. The neediest tract in the city, an area that includes Rate Field, a church and the Wentworth Gardens housing development, received 35 trees. 

While the tree planting program was innovative in its financing and public education, the city was hobbled by relying on its old system of determining who gets trees: those who ask, receive.

In poor neighborhoods, residents often have more pressing daily matters to grapple with than getting a tree planted on their block. What’s more, many of those same residents don’t trust city services after decades of neglect and know a tree can quickly become a nuisance or a hazard if the city is slow to maintain it. A few City Council members in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods have even asked that no more trees be planted in their wards.

A city effort to enlist community groups to encourage residents to request more trees has had modest success, shifting cultural attitudes through public education and block-level organizing.

City leaders argue the overall picture shows an overwhelming success.

“Nobody wants to give a win to the city when there’s an obvious win,” Cole Stallard, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation, said. “Everyone wants to talk about what we’re not doing.”

City decides to launch Our Roots

When Lightfoot took office in 2019, she encountered a decimated city tree canopy. After former Mayor Rahm Emanuel dissolved the Chicago Department of the Environment in 2012, tree plantings slowed while thousands of older trees were destroyed by diseases and parasites. As a result, the city went from about 19% tree coverage in 2010 to 16% in 2020, according to The Morton Arboretum.

The mayor’s office, buffeted by data from the Department of Public Health tying health disparities to tree cover, opted to carve a $46 million chunk out of a bond timed with the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act to fund a five-year capital project.

Rather than continuing to pay for planting out of the city’s annual operating budget, the idea was to treat the endeavor like a major city-backed construction project. The goal was ambitious: 75,000 trees planted within five years.

“It was complete panic, I’m not going to lie,” said Stallard, of the moment he heard the number. Under the typical pace, Stallard’s department — the main steward of the city’s tree canopy — could plausibly get 22,000 trees into the dirt during that period, he said. 

Adding to the challenge was a directive from the mayor’s office to narrow the equity gap between neighborhoods like Edgebrook and the comparatively concrete-covered Englewood. It would be no easy feat in a system where the department relies on residents to request new trees before they can be placed.

Tom Ebeling, the director of forestry at the environmental nonprofit Openlands, based in Chicago, said cities in the country with progressive tree policies have an ‘opt-out’ model.

“The forester drives around and they say, ‘Oh, that’s a place for a tree,’ and they stick a flag in the ground that says, ‘A tree is coming here,’” Ebeling said. Residents would then have to call the city to say they don’t want the tree.

Streets and Sanitation briefly used an “opt-out” planting model at the beginning of Our Roots but dropped it amid backlash from residents, officials said.  

'An essential tool'

Advocates say relying on residents to opt in for new trees doesn’t take into account the varying enthusiasm across Chicago’s neighborhoods.

Residents in Portage Park, for example, on the Northwest Side requested more than 3,400 new trees between 2022 and 2025, according to an Illinois Answers analysis of city 311 data. The city received fewer than 40 tree requests from Riverdale on the Far South Side during the same period.

Adding green space is not always top of mind in communities whose residents struggle with day-to-day needs. But many in those same neighborhoods see that more trees mean a better quality of life, have proven to boost property values and even lower crime.

Studies have shown that trees not only improve air quality, control flooding and lower temperatures in summer time — they also can increase property values and even decrease crime.  

“Trees are just such an essential tool … from a health perspective, from an energy efficiency perspective, from an air quality perspective,” said Angela Tovar, commissioner of Chicago’s re-formed Department of Environment. “In communities … where we have vulnerable populations, we know that planting trees can actually assist in creating better health and environmental outcomes.”

Crystal Gardner, for one, sees the importance of shade in Austin on Chicago’s West Side every summer. Without trees and air conditioning, her bay windows trapped heat in her apartment and her parked car baking in the sun. 

“So I'm going from a hot apartment to a hot car with black leather interior. So I find myself looking for shade when I'm parking in anywhere on the West Side, especially on my block, and that's when it hit me.” Gardner said. “... where am I going to park so I don't burn the skin off my legs when I come back to this vehicle?”

Over time, the lack of trees worsens a key problem in Austin, which has one of the highest rates of asthma in the city. City data shows that nearly 1 in 5 people in Austin suffer from asthma, ranking the neighborhood 9th-worst in Chicago.

'For generations to come'

In lieu of prescribing where every tree would be located, city officials relied on community groups to increase requests for trees in high-need areas. 

Specifically, leaders have leaned on intermediaries like Openlands and The Morton Arboretum, whose Tree Ambassador Program has funded dozens of small neighborhood-based organizations. Each is tasked with organizing neighbors to make requests with a goal of planting 100 trees in their areas.

“We have mobilized hundreds of people to work that already care about trees and understand the value of trees in their neighborhood,” Tovar said of the all-hands-on-deck effort. “We don’t do this alone.”

In Chinatown, a group of high school students led efforts for more trees.

“They were walking around Chinatown and they’re seeing that a lot of Chinatown spaces, as small as Chinatown is, don’t have green spaces or parkways filled with grass,” said Grace Luk, who works at Project:VISION, a Chinatown-based nonprofit that had enrolled in the Tree Ambassador Program. “It’s very concrete based.”

For young people in neighborhoods from Austin to Chinatown, the trees weren’t just an environmental issue. They were about making a neighborhood they want to grow up in. 

Advocates in neighborhood groups knocked on doors to talk to local residents about planting trees outside of their homes, many times tasked with addressing concerns and sometimes misconceptions. 

Some said they even planted and watered trees in their neighborhood as part of the effort to grow the canopy. 

Students in Austin say that more trees would mean they could play outside in the summer heat. 

And for teenagers in Chinatown, Luk said, trees represented a step toward making their neighborhood feel safer and more welcoming. 

“Something as simple as planting a tree … can actually have long-lasting things for generations to come,” Luk said.  

But for many communities high on the list, residents see trees as trouble. 

Cultural resistance to trees

Aversion to trees by residents and the elected officials who represent them is one of the biggest challenges in the city’s efforts to plant them in neighborhoods with few trees. 

Branches fall onto cars and thrash against windows during storms, and roots bust sidewalks and snake into water pipes. And residents gripe to their alderpeople.

“We got people who did not want the trees, and then some who did want them,” said Ald. David Moore (17th), who represents parts of Englewood and Auburn Gresham on the South Side. Moore commended city Streets and Sanitation workers for removing some new trees after neighbors said they did not want them.

The 17th ward ranks among the highest in the city for asthma, flood vulnerability and average temperature, according to data from The Morton Arboretum, making it a high priority.  

Still, many constituents remain suspicious of planting efforts, voicing fears that roots could leech into their plumbing, Moore said.

Moore is not the only South Side alderperson to side with constituents who resist new trees.

Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th) was blunt with Stallard during a 2024 budget hearing. “Let’s talk about trees. Don’t plant no trees in 16, OK?” Coleman said. “I’m letting you know now, if you plant them, Englewood will cut them down.”

Before that, former Far South Side Ald. Carrie Austin (34th) also publicly resisted new trees.

Decades of neglect of communities on the South and West sides have also eroded trust in the city to maintain trees properly, leading to issues, many advocates said. In Englewood and Chinatown, residents say city workers take too long to respond to maintenance problems.

Those organizations not only have to encourage residents to request trees but also rebuild trust that the city will be good stewards of those trees.

“It's not enough just to have this push to plant more trees, but it needs to be integrated in a larger strategy of taking care of and maintaining existing trees,” Itaagi said. “Because if not, the cycle will continue where we plant more trees, they grow really big, they end up not being maintained. And then ultimately, what is that doing for public perception?” she said.

Historically, Chicago has poorly maintained its trees and has been slow to respond to requests, said Ebeling of Openlands. During the Daley administration, many trees were planted with limited maintenance, he said. 

Other resistance to new trees in neighborhoods arose from cultural issues. For example, Wenyan Wang, who spearheaded a tree planting effort with the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community, said civic engagement in Chinatown overall is difficult. 

Residents in Chinatown are reluctant to get involved in city issues in general, with some citing concerns that political involvement causes more harm than good.

In Austin, Gardner cited a disconnect with the environmental movement. When Gardner started Westside Environmental Justice Alliance in 2024, she knew it was overdue. 

“Historically, we have been left out of the educational trainings, the conversations, the advocacy … the green social movement did not have Black folks and residents of these overlooked communities at the table,” she said. 

In Pilsen, immigration enforcement forced residents inside, halting efforts to increase tree requests, said Claudia Galeno-Sánchez of the group Women for Green Spaces.

A common thread across Chicago’s diverse communities is that many of them face urgent problems like paying rent, safety from violent crime and access to quality education. That makes environmental concern secondary. 

Wang said residents in Chinatown are dealing with poverty and safety issues that make trees feel like “a privilege for our community,” she said.

Still, city officials credited local groups like Wang’s for helping facilitate a surge of new trees in neighborhoods that had historically been deprived.

Results

As of April, city workers between the Department of Transportation and the Department of Streets and Sanitation had combined to plant more than 67,400 new trees on public property since the launch of Our Roots Chicago, putting them ahead of schedule for their goal of 75,000 new trees within five years. 

The sum does not include new trees planted by the Chicago Park District or by Openlands, which is licensed with the city to plant and care for new trees in street parkways.

Residents and community groups have run into other issues. Some have complained of inconsistent service by the contractors hired by the city to plant trees and care for them during their first two years of life. Others say city workers have been slow to cut concrete out of sidewalks to make space for trees.

Neighborhoods on the city’s South Side had some of the longest response times to 311 tree planting requests, Illinois Answers analysis of city data shows. 

Itaagi said she’s waited as long as two years to hear back on requests for Englewood. 

Stallard said the disparity could be attributed to when the requests were made during each planting season. 

The commissioner called the varied complaints about planting anecdotal, saying the overlying data point to an unqualified success for Our Roots Chicago.

“If you look at it, it’s a win,” Stallard said of the multiyear effort. “It’s pretty badass that I’m going to be able to say that in five years we planted 75,000 trees.”

But it’s not just about planting trees, Itaagi said. The city has to maintain the ones they planted — including after city leaders have completed the Our Roots project. 

“That is an issue within the city of Chicago at large, but especially within our community,” she  said. “It does take forever to have trees trimmed or removed if they’ve fallen.”

A big part of Greater Englewood’s work in the Our Roots initiative is to regain that trust from the community. 

“But that's an investment that we're putting in for the next generation, so that they don't have to face the same type of air quality issues that we have,” Itaagi said.

Drone video and photo by Talia Sprague for Illinois Answers Project.

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