Or it seems that we all love trees.

Trees mean legacy and life.

He told me he wanted to be called Edward.

I had my hand on him.

He spoke to my heart.

We know the trees are good for us.

We have a dense woodland community here that's providing cleaner air for folks nearby in the city.

But are we losing too many trees to some developments?

I mean, they're tearing everything down.

It's like they're moving the city out and out and out.

As far as a culture of being ambivalent about trees, I can certainly say that that is not the case.

Kansas City wants to grow, but is it going about it in the right way?

We've built a city.

We can't afford to police we can't afford to maintain.

What can Kansas City learn from other cities in the metro?

So that's the tree that if there were an ordinance violation on, would be a $4,500 contribution to the tree fund.

Is it time for Kansas City to revise its tree preservation ordinance?

Yes.

Yes.

I think the ordinance should be strengthened.

Or is the city set to lose one of its last urban forests over the years, seeing it get bitten into from different directions, it's just kind of heartbreaking.

Support for the politics of trees is made possible by the William T Kemper Foundation, Commerzbank Trust and the generous financial support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

On a freezing afternoon in December, people are gathering in northeast Kansas City to say goodbye to a local celebrity.

I am actually a newbie to the northeast, and I saw Frank and I saw his legacy.

Frank is a very old Burr Oak, and he was named after a previous owner.

Now he has a new owner and we just thought we were buying a really cool house.

We didn't know we were getting a really cool tree with it, and now it's turned into our claim to fame.

This tree is pre-Revolutionary War.

It is pre Louisiana Purchase and as pre-Civil War, pre-World War One, World War two.

It's been calculated that Frank could be as old as 340 years, but now parts of him are rotting and Jessica has decided to have him removed.

It is going to cost us $9,000 to cut the tree down after living here for four months.

Aside from any historical or esthetic value, is a large tree like Frank worth the upkeep?

What do trees do for us?

And I was out here one day messing around in the yard, and for some reason Edward popped into my head and I was just like, oh, so you're Edward.

Nancy, Steve and Edward the Burr Oak live in Lee's Summit to the southeast of Kansas City, Missouri.

We had our roof done recently.

Yeah, but there was no hail damage.

Well, that's because the trees have sheltered that sheltered the house from the weather elements.

Edward's leaves may make a mess in the fall, and his acorns a large enough to twist ankles.

But quietly, he's providing services to the house beside him and to the wider community.

He keeps us cool, keeps our air conditioning bill down using an app called My Tree.

Nancy has estimated the good work that Edward is doing on the east side of the house.

Our trees are an asset, just like a streetlight and a sidewalk.

They're not always considered the same, but they are this living thing that is providing benefits not just to the person under them, but to the region and to the surrounds.

Some metro cities, like say, Away in Kansas and Liberty, Missouri, have put in place laws to protect individual trees.

The trees are still here because the developer wanted to preserve them as part of their credits.

So this is a Penn Oak just esthetically is wonderful.

The size is really impressive.

Let's look at fairway first.

It may be named after the golf course.

Is nearby, but it describes itself as the City of trees.

It's a big focus.

Every year we have a tree plan.

Cut down a healthy tree in fairway that falls within the right of way, even if it's in your private front yard.

So it's usually 25ft from the center of the street, and you'll have to pay a $100 per inch of the tree's diameter over the state line in the city of Liberty, to the northeast of Kansas City.

Local law says if a developer chops down a mature tree, they have to plant two or make a payment to the city's tree fund.

This particular developer does like the environment and wants to make sure that it's well respected, and every mature tree that's left standing could earn the developer a credit of three trees against those they have to plant as part of required landscaping in Liberty.

The Tree Preservation Ordinance, passed in 2013, has changed the culture among developers and development here has gone from having to pay 60 to $80,000 in a tree in lieu fee to $0 because they're preserving enough trees in their development, they don't have to pay fees.

Fairway passed its tree preservation ordinance in 2014.

It's also changed the culture among builders.

Now there's a lot of the same builders that redevelop, and most of them are very aware or they have heard about it.

Things are different in Kansas City's Northland.

My husband is down here.

All his life.

I've been here for 40 years and it was just beautiful out here.

It was just trees.

It was just wonderful.

Kansas City, Missouri passed its tree preservation ordinance in 2023.

Two weeks ago, I went to Denver.

When I came back, the area just to my left over here was completely cleared further down and it was including long lived oak trees.

Kansas City's tree preservation ordinance does not protect individual mature trees or small areas of trees if they want to.

Developers can cut these down with impunity.

From what I understand, a lot of our development that's happening is not even required to do tree preservation because they may not have that one acre of contiguous.

Kansas City's ordinance is only triggered if an acre or more of contiguous or dense tree canopy is at risk.

Speaking to the culture of the development space, in the same way that not all trees are created equal.

Not all development people are created equally.

Some place higher value on certain aspects of a piece of ground as opposed to others.

Tina has lived in the same house near to Barry Road in Kansas City's Northland for 40 years.

We can see what her area looked like in 2006 and then in 2024, and then in 2025.

Do you feel like the city is articulately protecting trains?

Kansas City, Missouri?

Oh, no, I do not.

They're not protecting the trees whatsoever.

Ken lives around the corner.

You drive down Barry Road now, and you don't see that balance between environment.

The woods and urban sprawl.

Kansas City's mayor wants to see a culture change among those developing in the north of the city.

People need to recognize what's lost when we take out trees, when we cut down trees.

It is a irreplaceable asset, at least as to where it is and its impact on the root system, on the community in which it sits.

Kansas City has recently committed itself to preserving and enhancing its green space, and trees will look more preservation later on.

But the city has been planting trees beside its streets.

The soil off the top on a massive scale.

You know, people always ask you what your legacy in a job might be.

Hopefully 30, 40, 50 years from now, if I'm not around my sons, maybe their children can see that.

Wow, we have these great tree lined streets somewhere.

The city doesn't have the figures for its existing tree canopy.

However, we can see that it grew in the six years prior to 2022.

How does it compare to some of its peer cities?

We know that if you don't have trees in your area, there's hard to find shade.

It's hotter in those spaces.

In the last few years, helped by a federal grant of $12 million, Kansas City has planted over 13,000 trees beside streets right around the city.

Local energy company Evergy has planted 1700 trees.

Today, volunteers for the Heartland Tree Alliance, which has a contract with the city, are planting trees on the city's east side.

We're excited to get some shade in these spaces.

There's a huge walking trail that so many people walk every day to.

The bus stops on hot days in Kansas City.

It's estimated that the urban landscape increases the heat by at least eight degrees for just over 370,000 people, which has all these other spillover effects in terms of utility bills, utility burden, and or just overall quality of health.

And things are going to get worse in the coming decades.

The Kansas City area is expected to see heat index temperatures above 125 degrees.

All of that pavement, those buildings, those parking lots, that gray infrastructure collects a lot of heat.

The magic of trees is that they can cool a neighborhood by up to ten degrees, not only the shade, but as they respire and let off moisture into the air.

That helps cooler temperatures in the east side of Kansas City.

It's a race against time to get these trees planted.

Many of the mature trees here are dying off.

We have a fun saying the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the second best time is today.

Trees can also help with the city's air quality.

Trees meaning cleaner air for our young people.

And I think that is vital, particularly in zip codes, where we see lower life expectancy.

Around 1 in 12 Americans have asthma.

With people on a low income senior adults, black, Hispanic and Native American people are disproportionately affected.

Now, for every ten percentage point increase in a city's tree canopy, there's an expected 4% decrease in asthma related hospital visits since 2023.

Kansas City may have planted thousands of trees, but it's also lost mature trees as building sites are cleared.

The city doesn't have up to date figures for tree loss on private land.

It's just a mess.

The whole thing is a mess.

The trees that they're tearing down.

The developers have left a few trees on the edge of their site, but she's worried they're going to die.

I mean, that tree's been there forever, and it's going to come this way.

Probably under my car.

Compact the soil over a tree's root zone and you'll kill it.

It's why fairway requires builders to put up protective fencing.

So if there was a pile of dirt or gravel here that they're using within 1 or 2 years, I'd say more times than not, we started seeing rapid decline.

Unfortunately for Tina, the builders at the back of her house haven't put up any fencing.

Kansas City's tree preservation ordinance requires it.

But the plan for this site was approved before the law was passed, so it doesn't apply.

Some people watching this may say she is against the government because it's in her back.

Oh, I'm not against development.

I'm against tearing down the trees, the nature, the.

You know that I used to say deer, rabbits, everything.

Now nothing.

In recent decades, not all of Kansas City has seen population growth.

A lot of it has happened in its northern suburbs.

The public likes to think developers are the bad guys.

Those are just people who decided they wanted to get into the business of building cities, and the the game we've created makes it profitable to build this way.

The game changed in the 1950s with a surge in car ownership.

Suburbs became more of a possibility, and since then Kansas City has been spreading itself more thinly outwards, sometimes at the cost of trees.

We've always built cities to bring people together, which creates opportunities.

It creates economies.

But the way we've grown for the last hundred years is taking a lot of that flexibility and versatility out of our cities.

For several years now, Dennis has been trying to catch Kansas City's air.

He has a stark warning to deliver.

Yes, we've built a city we can't afford to police we can't afford to maintain.

We can't afford to provide opportunities to folks that we want to have opportunities so that all of us thrive together, which is what the real American Dream was supposed to be about.

As developers build outwards from the suburbs.

Kansas City has to spend more on public services, such as maintaining the new roads.

The city is struggling to balance its books.

The shortfall for its next budget is just over $64 million.

The city's rainy day fund of over $200 million will help.

But if costs on things like roads are deferred, this could lead to trouble.

Over time, that becomes an exponential problem.

The example that most people who are in this conversation readily point to is you end up with Detroit, you end up with a city that just falls apart.

Yes, we build the city we can't afford.

And I think the greatest challenge is manifest Destiny, not just in terms of how we built America, but how we build and live in our American cities.

This idea of you have to keep going out newer, bigger, different, more distant.

We have incredible infrastructure costs that relate to it.

We have incredible natural impacts.

There should be a much more equitable, tax structure that makes the valuable center of the not so valuable edge sustainable together.

But is it possible to at least see development done without the clear cutting of all the trees?

When we saw the street was designed to go right through these trees, we made the decision to put a little bit of a dogleg in the street.

Save those trees.

We're back in Lee's Summit to the southeast of Kansas City, where David Gale has developed over 1200 acres.

There's another big oak right there.

There's profit margin.

Can we sell these lots for more?

And yes, you can.

Lee's summit has a conservation ordinance which doesn't impose any direct penalties on developers for chopping down trees.

Once the city has approved the plan, nonetheless, David wants to retain mature native trees on his sites when possible.

But more importantly, the lot doesn't sit waiting for a customer.

That's the time value of money.

It's because of David that Edward, the Burr Oak we met earlier was spared.

David's customers like his approach.

When we were looking for a house, right.

We had narrowed it down to two houses.

The trees actually took the balance to save mature native trees.

Roads and even houses were redesigned.

What we're looking at is a pretty extreme exercise in saving a tree.

With with the, cut out.

I'm frankly quite surprised that this tree has survived.

David isn't afraid to clear what he calls scrub forest.

On our periphery, you can see the scrub forest cost us about $90,000 to remove ten acres.

One of our challenges in real estate development is we scar the land, and then we might leave it dormant for a while.

And the result of which is this scrub forest.

This has been less than ten years.

And we have the black locust, which will have six inch spikes on it.

Callery pear.

One of our grossest invasive plants.

The scrub forest has been removed.

Some quality trees have been saved and planting has already begun on the site.

This will be probably 100ft by 250ft wildflower meadow.

Most of these houses are middle to high end single family.

If you're fortunate enough to live here, you'll have access to seven miles or so of trials.

And there's a private 108 of wood.

You can't engineer this.

This is.

This is like Disneyland in nature.

David doesn't believe that he builds subdivisions.

He'd rather say that he's in the business of building communities.

It's the feel of it.

When you.

When you stand here and I'm looking at four foot caliper trees in a relatively new subdivision.

Now, we don't do subdivisions.

We do communities.

And this is this is part of it.

This is how you build community.

I see trees and agriculture at large as a connector.

It helps connect individuals together.

And it also helps connect us to the Earth.

In the Ivanhoe neighborhood on Kansas City's east side.

The neighborhood council, with the help of the Giving Grove, has planted a community orchard at the back of its building.

The city has also planted trees along the right of way here.

But this was a tree actually planted by the city of Kansas City as a part of their initiative to get more trees in the city at large.

Research shows that trees strengthen communities.

Trees are a sign of a surviving striving, thriving community.

When you have trees in place, you know that's a community where things are growing.

You see in areas that are more green, you have higher social cohesion because people feel comfortable walking, and then you just happen to run into your neighbor and think about how you did.

It's also great to see other walkers, other people who are enjoying the same kind of forest area as we are to.

Hello.

Hi.

Kansas City may be increasing the number of street trees, but it also has some vast publicly accessible forests.

It's just the most gratifying feeling to live in the woods.

You know, we feel.

I feel like I'm some sort of a hobbit or gnome or something.

Listen to that sound.

Oh, my goodness.

David Bayard is a poet and furniture maker whose house in the south of Kansas City, not far from Miner Park, is surrounded by forests.

We've hosted gatherings of poets and so forth here, and it has a real generative quality to it.

In Swope Park, in the east of the city, about six miles from the Ivanhoe neighborhood, you'll find an ancient, vast forest.

Now, the other cool way to I.D.

the Hickory just by the smell.

Now you get familiar with the smell of hickory.

So it's a unique getaway where people can come and experience the health benefits of immersing yourself in the green zone.

Huckleberry.

Two nature walks.

Here.

Sign up.

And you two could see something like this.

Wow.

So beautiful.

And then in Kansas City's Northland, there's a forest of around 800 acres.

Modern life.

You're sitting around, you're looking at your, you know, phones, computers, even TVs.

And it's nice to just get out and take advantage of what nature has to offer.

Very busy times.

I know Pileated woodpecker.

Oh, wow.

Great horned owls nest here.

Barred owls nest here.

Eastern screech owl nest here.

Lots of woodpeckers.

Lisa is birdwatching in the forest in Kansas City's Northland.

These are some of the birds she's photographed here.

A recent study showed that since 1970, the number of birds that live in forests like this has declined by 27%.

In other words, this is precious habitat.

I've seen just about every bird that's been reported on this trail, about 170 or so.

Now we know the forests like these provide important public benefits.

We want to see what we've got.

We can plant trees all day, but it takes a long time for them to get to the same status of providing those type of benefits that the trees that we currently have.

It's like a deer, but one of these three forests could be under threat and its local community is worried.

So I've been talking to a lot of the property owners around here because my goal was to see, can any of this land be saved?

It's just such a special place.

And over the years, seeing it a seeing it get bitten into from different directions, it's just heartbreaking.

And you worry about, you know, what's going to happen in the future.

The Missouri Department of Conservation describes the Line Creek Forest in Kansas City's Northland as a high quality forest with a good mix of old and new native trees.

A few years ago, the Park Hill School District, which owns the forest in the south, chopped down trees to build two schools.

Amanda Mitchell and their son live opposite the northwest corner of the forest, which is owned by a private developer.

The first step they did was basically take like basically chainsaws, because these trees in this area were so, you know, old and developed and mature.

This is what Amanda is talking about.

In 2022, the developer started to clear around 30 acres of forest.

Kansas City's tree preservation ordinance did not apply because the development plan was submitted prior to it being passed.

We were just waiting for the next step to happen, and nobody ever came back to develop this apartment complex that they told us was going to be here.

The public trail through the Lying Creek forest is popular in a recent two and a half month period.

The city's trail cameras clocked over 20,000 users.

We come here as often as we can.

Living just a few blocks away.

But as part of the update to its major street plan, Kansas City has been consulting the public on the idea of a new route for a road that would run through the Line Creek forest and cross the trail.

So we talked about the options either, having a bridge over the trail.

The community's worried that approval of a road would mean more of the forest would be chopped down for development, and then the right developer could come along and just change us another time.

So that's where I kind of go back to.

Let's just nix this.

The new road through the Line Creek forest, shown here in yellow, would be built by developers to allow access to their new developments.

Developments that could come at the cost of the forest.

You know, I have not studied the issue in full.

What I will say is this wherever we can preserve forest, we should try our level best to do so.

Surely the best hope the community has for saving the Line Creek forest is Kansas City's tree preservation ordinance.

Personally, I always realized it was necessary to establish an ordinance because we were losing tree cover dramatically, primarily north of the river.

Back in 2018, while she was working in City Hall as a project manager, Patty assembled a team to start drafting Kansas City's tree preservation ordinance.

Sarah Crowder was part of the effort.

Typically, a tree preservation ordinance starts to address trees that could be found in those spaces that are, more private, right?

Those to be developed.

Of course, going into this, as I told our group, we would probably achieve 50% of what we proposed.

After much lobbying by Kansas City, Northland developers and their representatives, the city passed the ordinance in March of 2023.

You have a nice one.

That ordinance passes.

We already know that the ordinance is only triggered if an acre or more of dense tree canopy is at risk.

But that should mean the Line Creek forest is safe.

Shouldn't it?

Of course.

It's devastating to the environment, to the landscape, to the trees, to the wildlife.

But unfortunately, the ordinance does permit this.

The tree preservation ordinance didn't preserve these woods.

Not far from the Line Creek forest.

In February this year, the developers are clearing 29 of the 32 acres of trees here.

Mitigation allows them to make a certain payment in lieu of the trees they've removed, or it allows them to replace the trees on site.

Under the ordinance, for each acre of trees, the developer wants to clear, they would have to pay a maximum of $10,000 or plant up to 26 trees.

Regarding this site, under the ordinance, no money was paid and the developer will have to plant 370 trees.

In addition to the 242 required by landscaping.

We don't know much about the trees that stood here, but we can see that most of these woods were here in 2006.

The clearing of this site doesn't bode well for the Lying Creek forest down the road.

Is it what I had hoped for?

No.

Is it more of a mitigation ordinance versus a preservation ordinance?

Yes.

I think I and many people would agree that the ordinance should have been more robust.

And maybe it could be if there's effort to modify it.

One of the cautions I would have, though, is that passion does not fully substitute for expertise.

And if a community's priorities is above all else, the preservation of trees, then the ordinance is appropriate.

We need more housing.

We need it to be more affordable.

We need it to be in different places.

We need it to look different and cost different things.

Yes, yes, I think the ordinance should be strengthened.

Let builders build.

Let them do all types of stuff.

But I think we're all the better with the trees.

The trees.

They are my champions.

They raised their arms to take me in.

They see my cloud of worry, my cloud of doing.

And they wisely speak out.

David, shed your skin.

Come into being.

World of grace.

And raise your arms to heaven.

There is no other place to be but here and now.

There is a forest.

We may moan and twist and turn and bend within the wind.

But it is not a doing.

It is simply done.

We are not as than we are, and we are finally tree enough.

And eternally are nothing but ourselves.