Forest Hills Is Queens' 2nd Greenest Area, Despite Low Tree Gains

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — Despite its name, Forest Hills only got a bit greener in recent years.

New York City’s trees and leaves grew about 2 percent between 2010 and 2017, according to a first-of-its-kind report by the Nature Conservancy, which mapped the amount of the city that’s covered by overhead tree canopy.

Forest Hills, however, barely added any tree coverage. The neighborhood saw a net gain of 2.3 acres or 0.17 percent, landing it among the ten areas in Queens that gained the least trees and leaves.

This slow growth might be because the primarily white, wealthy neighborhood already has a lot of trees, and the city has attempted to focus on equity in its more recent tree planting efforts.

'Trees are an environmental justice issue'

Trees play a key role in urban equity, helping to lower temperatures, convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and absorb rainwater, which is especially impactful in low-income neighborhoods hit hardest by climate change, researchers told The City, which first reported on the study.

“Nature-based solutions are not a luxury, but rather a necessity for all communities,” Annel Hernandez, associate director at the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, told The City.

In a recent op-ed titled "New York City trees are an environmental justice issue," she advocated for planting more trees and building parks in the city's neighborhoods that are affected by redlining.

Notably, the city’s neighborhoods with higher heat vulnerability and poverty rates have less canopy overall, but during the study’s eight years, those areas saw the strongest tree growth, records show.

In Queens, for instance, half of the ten neighborhoods that saw the borough’s greatest net canopy gains — adding between 46 and 21 new acres of trees and leaves — are in southeast Queens.

Queens' second most tree-filled neighborhood

Forest Hills, by contrast, is not for want of trees.

According to the study, 82 percent of the available space for planting street trees in Forest Hills — known as the neighborhood’s “stocking rate” — was taken up by living plants as of 2015.

That higher-than-average stocking rate means that Forest Hills placed seventh in the borough in terms of how much of its available tree space is filled with trees.

And, the neighborhood is the second most-tree filled in Queens with 7,327 living trees as of 2015, the study found.

Other neighborhoods, like Averne and Edgemere on the Rockaway Peninsula, have trees planted in less than half of the available spaces designated for living plants.

Superstorm Sandy and Queens' tree count

Superstorm Sandy also played a role in the Rockaways’ lower-than-average tree cover: Some of the neighborhoods in the city that saw the greatest tree cover losses between 2010 and 2017 are areas hit hardest by Sandy, including waterfront parts of Brooklyn and Queens, the study shows.

A stretch of the Rockaway Peninsula encompassing Breezy Point, Belle Harbor, and Rockaway Park lost 36 acres of trees during the study’s eight years — a greater loss than any other area of New York City.

Half of the city’s ten neighborhoods that saw the greatest tree canopy losses between 2010 and 2017 are in Queens, which helps explain why The World’s Borough saw the least tree and leaf growth in the city at large: just a 0.92 percent boost in tree cover.

Here's the tree-data breakdown for Forest Hills, based on city Neighborhood Tabulation Area:

Forest Hills:

• Canopy net gain (2010-2017): 2.3 acres, 0.17 percent
• Number of trees (2015): 7,327
• Stocking rate (2015): 82.41%
• Most common tree: London planetree

Read the full "Future Forest NYC" study at the Nature Conservancy website.

Patch Editor Nick Garber contributed to this report.