In Rochester, some broil while others enjoy shade
How global warming is changing experiences
Where can everyone get relief on a hot day? “You see a lot of folks under the trees in the shade,” said Anthony Hall. “Stay in shade,” recommends Patricia Ferrin. “My house has got a wood floor, OK?” said Hannah Gilmore. “And the trees, you see the trees over it, so that keeps the inside cool.”
This is a transcript of the Democrat and Chronicle’s special “City on Fire” podcast, which can be found on your favorite podcast platform. It features reporters Rob Bell and Justin Murphy. It follows a visit to Rochester by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY).
“We don’t have the trees we need,” Schumer said. “In fact, the D&C, the Democrat and Chronicle, did a tremendous investigative series on this.”
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Bell: The report Sen. Schumer mentions is by my colleague, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle education reporter Justin Murphy. The story looks at data sources to examine the Rochester tree canopy and its disparities. It was produced as part of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2021 Data Fellowship. I interviewed Murphy for a behind-the-scenes look at his reporting.
Murphy: My idea was related to stories I’d seen elsewhere. I think there’s been growing attention to it, the concept of paying attention to the tree canopy as an equity issue and in particular racial and a wealth equity issue. I had seen reporting elsewhere showing how in the poorest parts of the city or a given place there’s fewer trees and that principally makes it way hotter. And then that has all these other downstream effects. And I think that when you hear that, that automatically rings true. Whatever city you’re from, that is in fact what a poor place looks like compared to a rich place.
Bell: What surprised you most about what you uncovered with your research?
Murphy: The most striking thing to me about it was regarding temperature. And within the city of Rochester on a given hot summer day, there can be a difference of as much as 12 degrees between two different neighborhoods in the city correlated extremely closely with tree cover. So I’m fortunate to live by Cobbs Hill in southeast Rochester where there’s a lot of trees. So it can be, let’s say 80 at my house, hot but tolerable, and literally across town three miles away in my same city, 92 degrees. And every day that’s what people are waking up and walking around it. And it’s like, imagine just everything that goes downstream of that. Just basically, am I in a bad mood when I wake up because I didn’t sleep because it was mad hot. And then everything from that. So then once you look at that heat difference, that first of all, of course that’s differences in health outcomes, some respiratory things, but also I think a really important one is mental health. And again, that’s obvious and maybe it feels kind of like squishy, like, oh, I feel better when I’m around trees. But there’s actually extremely solid research showing a correlation with tree cover and mental health. And part of that has to do as well with crime rates. There’s lower crime rates in places with more tree cover and some of that’s correlation with wealth and class and all the other stuff, whatever. But even when you separate some of that out and really try to control for it, you can still see differences. And then of course, that all leads into property values and the same house on the same size yard, one where it’s 12 degrees cooler in the summer and has beautiful trees or not. That’s a big difference.
Bell: Why do some neighborhoods of Rochester have many trees and others have none?
Murphy: So there’s two reasons. One is a Rochester-specific reason, and the other I think is more general. The Rochester-specific reason is that the second half of the 19th century, a lot of the city and in particular in the southeast part of the city was nursery land. This was the epicenter for growing flowers and trees and stuff that people would order either for their property or a city would place an order for all the landscaping for the new land that they’re laying out or something like that. So huge parts of what is now Southeast, what wealthy Rochester was, big rose gardens or big tree lawns. And so they got this kind of sheen of civic wellness like the nursery owners. And that land that’s high-quality territory at the end of the century, there’s a pest that comes through and for several reasons basically ruins the whole horticulture industry.
And so these nurseries are going out of business and they very smartly pivot to real estate. A lot of the really nice neighborhoods in Rochester — East Avenue, Park Avenue, South Wedge, Highland Park, Cobbs Hill, Browncroft — that’s all laid out on former nursery land. And when they’re doing that, those nursery owners are really trading on this reputation they had as city founders. They’re on the Parks Commission and so they’ll be helping control the purchase of their own land and also plant material from the Municipal Park commission. They benefit from that personally and they invest those areas with this just kind of sense of gentility.
Other parts of the city either don’t have nurseries to start with. In the northeast for instance, there’s a lot of train tracks or they have them and they turn into something else. Like where Kodak Park is, that used to be nursery land; where the Public Market is, that used to be nursery land. So they don’t get these beautiful developments that are laid out. So those places got trees, either because they were already there or because there was this kind of throughline of greenery and prestige in that property already that was a selling point. What’s happened since then is the same thing I think that happens in every city in almost every circumstance, which is that people who have more privilege, who are closer to the levers of power are able to advocate for themselves better.
Bell,: Did those who advocated for trees in their neighborhood know their value?
Murphy: I think that everybody sort of inherently understands the connections with it’s good vibes and also it makes my property worth more and also I can feel the clean air in my lungs, that sort of thing. And so you can’t blame those people for advocating for their own property. It’s ultimately the responsibility of government to balance people’s needs regardless of how loud they complain about it. And in this case Rochester, (and) I think, just about every single city probably in the country, failed to do that.
Bell: What was the local response to your report?
Murphy: Yeah, so since my stories came out in April of 2022, first of all, I really went to pretty great lengths to ensure that I was cognizant that the map of places in Rochester that don’t have a lot of trees is pretty similar to the map of places in Rochester where people don’t subscribe to the D&C. It’s the same map as everything else. So I wanted to make sure that this was just not another benefit for the tree-having folks. So I went, spent a lot of time going up and down the streets, having tree tours and talking schools and libraries and stuff. It has coincided, I think, with national increased interest in the topic and also coincided with our new mayor, Malik Evans, coming into office in early 2022. So he has adopted this as a topic of interest. He has made some pretty impressive promises and to a still somewhat lagging extent, financial commitments around planting more trees and achieving equity and how many are planted across the four quadrants.
Bell: How do people who live in areas with no trees respond to your reporting?
Murphy: When you really tease out every part of it, it’s new information, but I think that there is a lot of immediate recognition and resignation to the basic premise: Yeah, of course there’s no trees over here. There’s no nothing else either. There’s no Wegmans either. So there’s that. And to what I was saying earlier, there are people that said, “Yeah, there’s no trees, and good. I don’t want any damn trees.” There was one lady that had a big beautiful tree in her backyard that was shading her deck, and there was an empty lot behind on the other side of the fence. And she was like, I hate this damn tree. I wish they would come and take it out. All these people go in the empty lot and they mess around. They hide behind it. I can’t see what all’s going on. I’m too old to rake the leaves. So I think that is easy to overlook when we just say, ‘Oh yeah, trees, man, they’re awesome. Everybody loves a tree.’ Sometimes, but maybe actually not.
Bell: A study titled “Environment and Crime in the Inner City” by the Environmental Design Research Association found that residents living in greener surroundings report lower levels of fear, fewer incivility and less aggressive and violent behavior.
Murphy: They did a study where they took people in court who had committed a property crime and somehow or other they were able to trace their path during the day where all they had been. And they found that people who had been in more places with tree cover, that was less likely to have led to a crime. And obviously there’s a gajillion things that go into that. But yeah, certainly we’re all familiar with the phenomenon that when it gets real hot out on a summer day, people lose their tempers and things are more liable to happen. There’s one other part of it that I really enjoyed. So when I talk about tree canopy, that’s obviously trees in the great totality like tens and tens of thousands of trees at a time. But I also wanted to talk to people about individual trees. And so part of what I was doing when I was walking all around and online as well, is I said, tell me about your favorite tree. Not like a species, like a tree that is planted somewhere. And I got just the best responses from people talking about this tree when they were growing up, or this tree that was at their grandma’s house or when they planted themselves or things like that. And we included, we collected, of those, I got a hundred-something responses.