Miami-Dade County’s urban tree project unable to shade residents from record heat

Kimberly Gutierrez could not breathe.

After checking in at an urgent care clinic, the twenty-something was diagnosed with a condition called pulmonary edema, a buildup of excess fluid in the lungs. She was advised to avoid the heat because her diagnosis makes her more susceptible to heat exhaustion or heat stroke.

In Miami-Dade, that’s not easy.

In her Hialeah neighborhood, the St. Thomas University student with a passion for gardening and nature is confronted with baking sun radiating off heat-intensifying concrete and asphalt. There are few trees to provide relief.

“Basically, you’re living in a concrete jungle,” said

Hialeah Councilman Bryan Calvo. It’s a problem that extends far beyond Hialeah’s city limits.

Long before last year’s record heat wave, the county government recognized that places across Miami-Dade were withering under an increasingly brutal sun. To address that, in 2007, officials drew up a document called “Greenprint For Our Future:

Street Tree Master Plan.”

The goal was to get the county to 30% tree coverage by 2020—mostly, by planting more trees.

Seventeen years and millions of dollars later, the county is not even close to reaching that target. Despite being relatively well funded and run by a team of dedicated environmentalists, the patchwork of loosely coordinated tree planting and giveaway programs that make up the county’s reforestation efforts have, so far, been ineffective in boosting canopy levels.

While the county government leads MiamiDade’s reforestation and canopy preservation efforts, it has limited jurisdiction to actually achieve its goals. It can’t unilaterally put trees on private property, which makes up most of the available planting land in the county. And a recent state law limits any local prohibitions against cutting down trees on residential property.

As canopy levels stagnated from widespread deforestation over much of the last decade, a Herald investigation found mismanagement, understaffing, jurisdictional issues, challenges enforcing preservation laws, and a lack of