Above photo: Allison Astorga/UnSplash.
Will It Actually Bring Shade This Time?
The last plan for more shade in Phoenix fell short. With a new $60 million initiative, the city aims to bring much-needed relief through trees, bus shelters and more.
This year, temperatures in Phoenix soared over 100 degrees for 113 consecutive days, a deadly streak for the hottest big city in America.
In November, the city approved a new plan, Shade Phoenix, to add 27,000 trees and 550 shade structures over the next five years — a plan that could save lives and provide some relief, especially to the city’s most vulnerable residents.
The city unveiled its last shade plan in 2010, but progress has been slow.
David Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation, doesn’t dispute that the follow-through on the last shade plan was “incomplete or uncertain.” But this time, he stresses, there is funding to make it happen — to the tune of $60 million.
“Money is in place to plant every tree, install every shade structure,” he says. “That wasn’t the case in 2010, so we’ve been trying to present a much higher level of confidence that the ambition in this plan can be realized in the next five years.”
Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation was first launched in 2021, motivated in part by the need for a new plan. Now, the 36 action items in the plan will increase the amount of available shade in the city using local and federal money.
One exciting feature? Phoenix residents can plant and nurture trees in their own yards through the expansion of the Community Canopy Program.
Through the program, each house can receive two free trees and apartment buildings can receive up to 50 trees. The city will help plant the trees, but watering is up to residents.
“We provide an irrigation timer, we provide a soil moisture meter, and we provide a beautiful 100-foot hose that residents can use to water those trees,” says Hondula. “We’re really encouraging neighborhood organizations to come together, whether they be formal or informal, and do this as a community-building activity.”
The city is also hiring “tree stewards” to guide and encourage community members. The goal is to plant 6,000 trees through the program.
If residents are worried about the cost of watering new trees, luckily Phoenix has a tiered billing system for water. “We have been pleased to learn that in many, many scenarios… the bill impact of watering two new trees on somebody’s yard could be zero,” says Hondula.
Removing dead trees can also be a barrier for homeowners who want to plant new trees, but Shade Phoenix includes funding for that too.
And it’s not just trees: The plan has the goal of adding 80 new bus shelters per year, eventually installing a bus shelter at every bus stop that can support one. Currently, about 75% of Phoenix’s 4,080 bus stops have a shelter.
The city will also invest $3 million to install about 20 shade structures in high-traffic areas for pedestrians, including intersections and mid-block crossings where people wait to cross the street.
“We’re also talking about ramadas in parks, shade structures at playgrounds,” adds Hondula.
There are still details to be worked out, such as a more comprehensive maintenance plan for the shade structures that are not at transit stops. Additionally, it’s still unclear how many of the 27,000 new trees will survive to maturity. The city is still working on a target survival rate but hopes to quickly replace juvenile trees that don’t survive.
Phoenix is currently in the process of completing its latest tree inventory, so there should be more data soon, says Hondula.