Durham’s Plan To Plant 1,500 Trees a Year May Face Funding, Development Challenges

This story was produced through a partnership between the INDY and The 9th Street Journal, which is published by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.

For almost three years now, the city of Durham has committed to planting 1,500 trees a year, nearly all of them in low-income communities. 

The city’s initiative to add more street trees is an effort to maintain Durham’s canopy and address historic discrimination that extended even to the ground between streets and sidewalks.

But this ambitious program faces questions about how it will be funded, and whether the rapid development in Durham’s booming real estate market will uproot trees as quickly as new ones are planted. READ MORE…