Friends of the Urban Forest is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco that plants and maintains trees within the city.
Organized as a response to the city's lack of trees, the group's first tree planted was a glossy privet on arbor day, 1981, in Noe Valley.[1] As of 2006 it had planted 40,000 trees.[1]
San Francisco was originally mostly sand dunes and has few native trees. Fog, wind, cold, and salty air made it difficult for native and planted trees to survive. Only buckeye and Pacific willow were common. Most of the 90,000 trees in the city were planted in the 1880s through 1920s as part of large parks and properties. Monterey Pines and Eucalyptus trees were planted in the San Francisco Presidio, Stern Grove, and Golden Gate Park.[2] However, these early trees were as of the early 2000s nearing the end of their life span and dying in large numbers.
At 12%, San Francisco's tree canopy cover remains considerably under the 22% national average. Benefits to planting more trees include aesthetics, improved property values (mature trees are said to increase surrounding property values by approximately 1%),[3] helping with global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide and providing oxygen, and energy savings due to increased tree canopy.
Even at more than 5,000 trees per year as of 2006, San Francisco's tree-planting efforts were modest compared to other cities in California and throughout the world. That year Los Angeles announced plans to plant one million trees, and the United Nations had raised funds to plant 121 million trees towards a goal of one billion trees.[3]
Friends of the Urban Forest was mentioned in an episode of the Sci Fi Channel reality show Who Wants to Be a Superhero?.
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Despite the public-spirited nature of the project, tree-planting efforts have been met by concerns about mess and sidewalk damage, blocked views, bad feng shui (the group hired a feng shui expert to help with tree placement in Asian neighborhoods), and environmental damage from invasive species (few types of trees are native to San Francisco). One protest group, calling itself "Gay Shame", distributed posters (which a group member described as "a prank") claiming that the improved property values resulting from the trees would displace homeless people in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood.[3]