Seattle Nice: IS Elon a “Smart Innovator”? And: More About that Tree Story

Your house was built by a developer.

By Erica C. Barnett

We managed to dig in to three (!) hot topics on this week's episode of Seattle Nice: Mayor Bruce Harrell's comment that Trump "surrounds himself by some of the smartest innovators around"—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen; a Seattle Times story about the ongoing closure of Victor Steinbrueck Park on the waterfront due to a dispute over two controversial totem poles; and the story I wrote about two women who sold a house that had been in their family for more than 70 years and walked into a buzzsaw of anger when activists learned the buyer planned to cut down a large tree on the property.

That tree story continues to get more comments than just about anything I've ever written, most of them calling me angry and biased and saying I have a vendetta against trees. If you haven't read it, don't get too excited—it's a reported piece about what happened with one tree when the family that owned the property decided to sell it after their mother died at 101.

Tree Action Seattle created an action page for "Grandma Brooks' Cedar" and led protests against the removal of the tree, claiming that the former owner, Barbara Brooks, cherished the cedar and told various people verbally that she wanted it saved after she died. Her daughters, including one who lived with her during the last years of her life, said nothing could be further from the truth: "Mom hated that tree," they both told me independently—and no one called her "Grandma Brooks."

Both women were quite upset at the way Tree Action and some neighbors have characterized their mother and her wishes after her death, and said they no longer feel comfortable in their old neighborhood. Tree Action, meanwhile, has doubled down, saying the sisters previously said that they planned to save the tree, reneged, and are now lying.

Activists from outside the neighborhood, as well as some neighbors, have argued that I should have discounted the Brooks' story about their own experience and reported that their stories were false—or, at the very least, presented the Brooks' version as dubious compared to the narrative on Tree Action's "Grandma Brooks' Cedar" page. Ultimately, reporting usually involves speaking to human beings and reporting their version of events; in this case, I found the Brooks sisters to be very credible when describing their own family's story.

Both sisters' stories were remarkably consistent: They told me their mother "hated that tree" because it required so much maintenance, and recalled that neighbors did not pitch in to help when their mother was alive and taking care of the tree on her own. They laughed bitterly at the image of their mother lovingly carrying buckets of water out to the tree in the summer; she did water her flowers with a bucket when it was hot, they said, but not the tree—which, both mentioned, prevented their mother from gardening in a large portion of her yard.

Both sisters also mentioned that neighbors often pestered their mother to put a covenant on the property to save the tree, but she refused. "My neighbor across the street— for years he would tell my mom, 'When you sell this house, put it in writing that this tree has to stay,' and she said, 'No—don’t tell me what to do,'" one of her daughters, Beverly, told me.

In the end, like most families who sell their houses, the Brooks sold for the best price they could get and moved on—thinking, they said, that this would be the end of the story. "Don’t homeowners, after they pay taxes for 75 years, have the right to sell the place?” daughter Barbara said.

Like, I have to imagine, most people who live in Seattle, I love trees. Seattle's natural beauty is one of the primary reasons I decided to move here. But I also know that the only way to meaningfully protect the city's tree canopy long-term is by planting more trees for future generations to enjoy, including trees in public spaces like parks (where a 2023 study found that more than half the tree canopy loss in the city is actually occurring). The new development on the Brooks' property, for instance, includes six new privately owned trees and one new street tree. No, those new trees won't immediately replace the shade of the one tree that was removed. But they will eventually.

That's the thing about trees: They often live longer than we do, long enough for us to forget about the context in which they actually grew. An 80-year-old, or even 100-year-old, cedar is not part of some old-growth forest—it was almost certainly planted, as landscaping, by the people who built the resource-hogging single-family houses that now make up neighborhoods like Ravenna. Go way back, and you'll find, yes, developers who clear-cut the ancient forest that used to cover this part of the Pacific Northwest, scraping the ground bare so that white colonizers could live here in the manner they preferred.

Should North Seattle homeowners have to think about that every time they look up at a tree on someone's private lawn and awe at the sweep of its branches? I'm not saying that, but I do think some perspective is in order. Banning private land owners from removing every large but not exceptional tree, which some advocates argue should happen as part of an upcoming review of the city's tree ordinance, will indeed protect isolated older trees in people's yards. It will also directly prevent the development of desperately needed housing in Seattle—pushing more and more people into distant exurbs, which can only be built by destroying the healthy forests that are large trees' natural habitat.