Using rakes, shovels and weed wackers, David Garcia is beautifying his Tucson Fairgrounds neighborhood and others on the south side of Tucson that struggle with overgrown vegetation, weeds, and trash.
Garcia runs the Instagram account Barrio Restoration. Through before-and-after pictures, group photos with volunteers, videos and flyers encouraging community members to come out and do their part — his page creates a green feed of community engagement.
“A lot of our streets have overgrown vegetation or trash, so we just decided to help out our neighborhoods,” Garcia said. “We lead by example, we all deserve a cleaner neighborhood.”
Garcia has been a landscaper for 25 years and has seen places around the city that aren’t facing the same issues as the Tucson Fairgrounds neighborhood located between Park Avenue and Sixth Avenue south of Ajo Way.
Garcia and other community members decided to take matters into their own hands by landscaping, creating gardens, planting trees, picking up trash and recycling tires and turning them into planters.
Despite the work Garcia and his neighbors and supporters are putting in to clean and beautify his community, Tucson Fairgrounds has a deeper nature-related problem — it has far fewer mature trees than many other Tucson neighborhoods.
This disparity in the number of trees between neighborhoods is what inspired Tucson Mayor Regina Romero to start the Million Trees Initiative, which aims to boost tree equity across the city of Tucson and help mitigate the effects of climate change and heat that are disproportionately affecting lower-income communities without much tree cover.
Tree equity
On the city’s Tree Equity Dashboard, neighborhoods across Tucson receive scores based on various factors.
The dashboard says the score “combines measures of tree canopy cover need and priority for trees in urban neighborhoods. It is derived from tree canopy cover, climate, demographic and socioeconomic data.”
Tucson Fairgrounds has a tree equity score of 52, according to the dashboard. The dashboard lists the community’s percentage of people in poverty at 71%, people of color at 96% and the existing tree canopy at 5%. Neighborhoods like Sam Hughes, Armory Park and Colonia Verde have scores of 100. The Colonia Verde neighborhood, near Udall park on the east side, is listed in the dashboard as having 10% people in poverty, 22% people of color and a tree canopy of 15%.
Robert McDonald is the lead scientist for nature-based solutions at The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental organization.
McDonald, along with nine other scientists, published a study in 2021 looking at the differences in tree cover and temperatures in urban areas across the U.S., that found there are fewer trees in lower income neighborhoods and neighborhoods where a majority of residents are people of color.
“We looked at a sample of almost 6,000 cities and the take home from that is that this issue is very widespread,” McDonald said. “I think low-income neighborhoods have less tree cover than high-income neighborhoods in about 92% of cities.”
“When we did this study we were really surprised just by how linear this trend was,” McDonald said. “It’s like every increase in income is correlated with an increase in tree cover. So it fits into this theme that it’s a pretty replicable pattern that’s present across most U.S. cities.”
On the city of Tucson’s tree equity dashboard there are many data points that make up the scores including existing tree canopy, goal tree canopy and priority index which prioritizes areas for tree planting initiatives.
Along with these numbers there is a stark difference in the median income of these neighborhoods. The median income of the Colonia Verde neighborhood, which has a tree-equity score of 100, is $63,183 while the median income of the Tucson Fairgrounds neighborhood is $35,649.
Garcia says true equity means considering people’s basic needs and addressing those first. People may want their neighborhood to look prettier but that is not their primary concern when the cost of living and housing has spiked so high that many Tucson residents are struggling to afford their homes.
“Some reasons why I think we don’t have tree equity is that we want to save on our water bills and we have power lines throughout our neighborhood that trees cannot grow under,” Garcia said. “Home ownership is also a big one, if you have renters and properties don’t have trees, there’s no investment there.”
Garcia said trees symbolize growth and investment and that some of these communities are not seeing the same ownership rates as others and also don’t have the education about what trees can do for the neighborhood.
Shady neighborhood inequities
Tucson Urban Forestry Program Manager Nicole Gillett runs the city’s million trees initiative and says different neighborhoods face different challenges and hurdles when it comes to tree equity.
“If we look at any city really, including our own, tree equity tends to go up the higher your population’s average income is, the fewer people that are in poverty, the lower percentage of unemployment rate and then the whiter your community is,” Gillett said.
Angelantonio Breault, the climate equity workforce and education director for nonprofit organization Tucson Clean and Beautiful, said it comes down to resource amenities and what these communities are able to do with them.
“[These richer neighborhoods] have the amenities and capital to make these changes that they want to see,” Breault said. “They have enough income so they can go out on their weekends and pick up trash as volunteers and hire landscapers.”
There are also common misconceptions about why communities facing poverty and communities that have less curb appeal look the way they do.
“There’s an ignorant misconception that communities that are experiencing climate vulnerability don’t want to make things better or there’s just laziness there,” Breault added. “A lot of that just comes down to the same racist tropes that we’ve heard for generations, but it really comes down to access and resources.”
City arborist Stephen Addison said while the tree equity dashboard tool is helpful, there isn’t one solution across the board that works for everyone.
“You can’t tell an exact situation by looking at a map, sometimes you need boots on the ground to see what each community needs,” Addison said. “We’re here to provide a starting point and let the communities take the lead in what they want to see done in their neighborhoods.”
But among efforts by Tucson Million Trees, Tucson Clean and Beautiful and community-led organizations like Barrio Restoration, there’s progress. In fact, according to Gillett, 100,000 trees have already been planted.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
