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The fruits of East Palo Alto’s decades-long effort to grow its urban forest are beginning to show.
Starting in 2007, about 1,200 trees were planted along a two-mile section bordering Highway 101 and in streets around the city, where the trees muffle traffic noise and filter pollution from cars. There’s a grove of mature silver lindens in Jack Farrell Park, planted in 2017. And at Los Robles-Ronald McNair Academy, an elementary school in the city, students can play and learn in a 100-tree arboretum unveiled last year.
Each tree at these locations represents years of advocacy, volunteer labor and a web of community partnerships. For years, East Palo Altans and the non-profit organization Canopy have planted trees to increase the city’s canopy coverage.
Today, about 13.5% of the city’s land is shaded by trees. That’s much lower than nearby Atherton, Portola Valley and Woodside – among the wealthiest areas in the country – which each have tree canopy coverage above 47%, according to a San Mateo County dashboard that cites data from 2022. Palo Alto and Menlo Park, which border East Palo Alto, also have higher canopy coverage of 38% and 27% respectively. The canopy difference between Atherton and Redwood City, which has canopy coverage of about 13%, is so disparate that the city boundaries are visible on Google Maps.
The comparison is stark, but the city’s Vice Mayor Ruben Abrica pushed back against the notion that there are fewer trees in East Palo Alto because residents don’t care to have them.
“Never think that people in East Palo Alto don’t care about trees,” Abrica said in an interview. “That’s not what it is. We care about trees as much as anybody.”
The benefits of trees are well-known. Shade from trees can lower the perceived temperature by over 10 degrees and can help scrub pollution from the air. There are also tangible health benefits like lowering stress and risk of cardiovascular disease.
An aerial view of East Palo Alto on Aug. 25, 2026. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
An aerial view of E O’Keefe Street in East Palo Alto on April 8, 2026. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
An aerial view of the Belle Haven neighborhood in Menlo Park on Feb. 25, 2026. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
An aerial view of the Crescent Park neighborhood in nearby Palo Alto, just across U.S. Highway 101, on Dec. 19, 2025. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
An aerial view of Middlefield Road in North Fair Oaks, an unincorporated neighborhood adjacent to Atherton on Aug. 30, 2026. Photo by Seeger Gray.
Residents in East Palo Alto have long worked to address the green disparity. In 2022, city council passed the Urban Forest Master Plan, a voluntary decades-long strategy for increasing the urban forest that aims to grow the city’s canopy coverage to 20% by 2062 and to 30% by 2122.
“With the city (of East Palo Alto) being one of the most under-resourced and recently incorporated in the region, its urban forest, like its other public infrastructure and amenities, received little investment and as a result is underdeveloped,” the plan states.
The plan involves planting 200 to 250 trees in public spaces and 150 to 200 in private spaces like backyards per year.
“Restoring nature and repopulating an urban forest is of paramount importance to the overall health and well-being of the community,” said Abrica, at an Aug. 22 community update on the Urban Forest Master Plan.
The Bay Area’s natural ecosystem is a shrubby grassland with large valley oaks and coast live oaks clustered throughout the area, said Aubrey Knier, director of community forestry at the nonprofit Canopy. The local organization works with cities and communities to promote sustainable urban forestry. That effort includes East Palo Alto, where it spearheaded the tree-planting efforts alongside community members at Jack Farrell Park along Highway 101 and at Los Robles-Ronald McNair Academy. Canopy was founded in 1996 in Palo Alto and has expanded to partner with the communities of Belle Haven, North Fair Oaks, and Mountain View since then.
“The interesting thing is, we have higher tree canopy in many areas of the Bay Area because we people have planted them,” Knier said. She added, “Urban tree canopy is so interesting because you can map social, racial (and) historical injustices onto (areas) where you see less tree canopy.”
In East Palo Alto, the city historically had tree-bearing landscapes of willow groves and oak woodland, but the region was converted to agriculture during European colonization in the late 1800s and subsequently to suburban development in the 1950s, according to the Urban Forest Master Plan.
Some native oaks remain, but a combination of factors have contributed to East Palo Alto’s lower tree canopy compared with neighboring cities, a history that Abrica refers to as “careless urban development.” These factors include landscape changes, 20th-century discriminatory housing practices, a lack of investment from the county before the city incorporated, water limitations, and the challenges of building a municipal government after the city’s incorporation in 1983.
Abrica now sees momentum building as the community moves to implement its Urban Forest Master Plan. Canopy estimates it has planted 3,500 trees in the city since 2007 and 650 trees in the last 6 planting seasons according to Bless Romo, a communications and marketing coordinator for the nonprofit. During the 2026 planting season this past year, the organization planted 121 residential trees and 136 trees on Ravenswood City School District Campuses.
The whole community is getting more and more engaged.”
Ruben Abrica
Abrica is hopeful that the city will exceed its tree-planting targets in the next few years as more organizations like the city, the school district, and churches – which have increasingly planted trees alongside asphalt parking lots – become involved. Landlords and rental apartments are additional entities that the green movement could include more actively, Abrica said.
“The whole community is getting more and more engaged,” Abrica said. “I feel very optimistic that we will restore the urban forest.”
At the Aug. 22 community meeting, leaders emphasized that planting trees takes sustained advocacy to secure funding, thousands of volunteer hours and years-long partnerships among organizations. Those investments have resulted in the first accredited arboretum for a K-12 school at Los Robles-Ronald McNair Academy, and hundreds of trees planted at two schools in nearby Belle Haven at All Five preschool and Belle Haven Elementary.
“This was not just a one-time unification project,” said Samuel Tavera, a member of the Ravenswood School District board of trustees, at the meeting. “This was part of an intentional larger effort…this [happened] because the community invested in it.”
Trees also require continual care in their early years, such as pruning limbs and regular watering, until they establish roots. Canopy cares for around 500 to 1,000 additional trees per year. Different tree species mature at different paces, but Knier said that most trees begin to cast significant shade after about ten years.
“Eighty percent of our planting opportunity is in people’s backyards,” Knier said. “If you want to increase the overall tree canopy of the community, you really need to connect one-on-one with residents and add trees to people’s backyards because they benefit the surrounding community as well.”
Though trees can take years to grow, they can bring instant joy to community members who have advocated for their existence, Knier said. Trees also begin interacting with flora and fauna immediately.
“I’ve planted a tree that’s pretty small, and I put the stakes in, and I’m putting away my tools, and I already see a bird sitting on one of its little branches,” Knier said. “It becomes a part of the ecosystem pretty immediately.”
