Eli Spevak of Orange Splot LLC

A Designing for Trees Feature By Kyna Rubin

Trees For Life Oregon showcases the creativity and thought processes of developers and architects who are taking the time to design buildings with trees in mind. Their work, which preserves or creates space for trees, illustrates that new development and trees need not be mutually exclusive.

January 14, 2020

Tree code and PBOT regulations sometimes make integrating large, existing trees into a building site "a pain in the neck,” says developer Eli Spevak. He does it anyway, while wishing the city would make it easier.

Developer Eli Spevak likes designing around large trees for lots of reasons.

Aesthetically, they help his projects better integrate into their surroundings because tall trees make new homes seem like they’ve been around longer than they have. He likes that established trees force organic rather than cookie-cutter shapes to site development, compelling him to “deliberately curve structures around trees.” Keeping trees is good for neighborhood relations-- having a new development next door can be “a hard pill to swallow,” he says, but the fact that he preserves tree groves whenever possible “can make it better.” There’s “a huge correlation” between trees and property value. And finally, he says, people living among big trees love them. The kids who reside at NE Portland’s Cully Grove, a two-acre site holding 16 homes and a shared common house that Spevak completed in 2013, use them for tree forts and swing in tree-anchored hammocks. The grove of Douglas-firs he preserved behind Cully Grove is a gathering spot for residents—something he knows because he and his family live there.

Building around trees can require some extra effort and cost, both of which many developers shun. How does Spevak pull it off? “I’m sure there are developers making more money on their projects than I am,” he says. But he thinks that’s related to factors other than tree preservation.

Spevak integrates long-term affordability into some portion of his projects by working with the city and Proud Ground, a community land trust. Offering homes that someone on a teacher’s salary could afford provides income diversity within the communities his developments create, which matters to him. The community land trust model allows a buyer, with city assistance, to purchase a home, without the land it’s on, at a steeply reduced price. This set up results in Spevak “voluntarily leaving money on the table,” he says, because the city grant covers only about half the gap between the lower price and the market-rate price. (Cully Grove homes, all market-rate, are the exception, as they were built during the recession, when he couldn’t “make the numbers work to do affordability.”) All units in his Woolsey Corner are permanently affordable, and more recent projects such as Mason St. Townhomes and the future Cully Green will each have three affordable units.

Bumping Out a Sidewalk

Spevak takes methodical steps to protect large-form trees. Sometimes these measures force him to spend time and money wrestling with regulations seemingly designed not to save trees. For instance, at Cully Grove he had to apply for a variance from the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) to wiggle a sidewalk around a hefty deodar cedar in order not to encroach on its roots. The wing of PBOT that deals with the public right of way, he says, “still seems very old school. They want the sidewalk straight.”

In neighborhoods like Cully, home to several of his projects, many large trees sit in or close to the sidewalk. Submitting an appeal to adjust the Cully Grove sidewalk cost him a month and a few hundred dollars for the application fee, he says. But the real cost went for his engineer, because a curved sidewalk is more expensive to design and build than a straight one.

Referring to an adjustment fee he also had to pay, he says, “They hit you again for doing the right thing, so the incentives are already stacked against you adjusting sidewalks to protect trees.” This explains why so many developers take trees down in this situation. “I think the city should make this as easy as possible or even make you put a sidewalk around there unless you make a proposal otherwise,” he says, suggesting a dramatic reframing of how the city thinks about large tree preservation.

Steering Around Root Protection Zones

In order to preserve the 47-inch diameter white oak standing in Cully Grove’s entry courtyard, Spevak had to create a 47-foot-radius protection zone, no exceptions allowed, even for a 1-inch encroachment. That’s because Cully Grove was built prior to the current tree code, or Title 11, which was implemented in 2015. Before Title 11, the two legal options for protecting tree roots during construction—the standard zone (today’s “prescriptive path”) and the alternate zone (today’s “performance path”)--were both more rigid than they are today, according to Morgan Tracy of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. Although the city permitted an arborist-produced alternate plan to protect the tree, approval for such plans was very hard to secure. (Under Title 11, the prescriptive path requires the same 1 inch/1 foot formula but now allows minor encroachments, and arborist-created alternate plans are more readily approved, says Tracy.)

Spevak believes that following the city’s rules on root protection zones increases the odds that a tree will survive. However, a 47-foot protection zone around his oak tree would not have accommodated the construction equipment needed. So on paper he reported he was going to take the oak down, which he says he could do without paying a fee because of the Douglas-fir trees he preserved elsewhere on the site. In fact, he didn’t touch the oak tree. He designed around it. Seven years later, the oak is “doing great,” he says, thanks to his arborist’s careful monitoring during and after construction, successfully using a smaller-than-code root protection zone he felt reasonably certain would not impact the tree.

Spevak can’t keep every tree he’d like to. On close examination, the arborist changed his mind about preserving a Douglas-fir on the Mason St. Townhome site because of doubt over whether it could survive construction. If it didn’t make it, the arborist told Spevak, the tree would be “incredibly hard to get out later” due to its proximity to structures. They also tried to protect a “really nice” Norway maple on the site, despite its being on the city’s nuisance tree list, but it didn’t bear up.

Another way Spevak preserves trees is to plan ahead for when an outsized, anchoring tree on a property will die. At Woolsey Corner, where a large silver maple is central to an exterior courtyard, he planted a copper beech as a successor tree, because he knows that silver maples, which are fast-growing and therefore brittle, don’t last long.

Advice for Developers

Spevak suggests that prior to design, builders interested in assimilating big trees into their projects first survey the site for its key natural features. That way “you know you’re making tradeoffs” by maybe taking down some trees but keeping others. “It’s so easy to see a site from an aerial photo or a plat map and say, ‘I know what I can put here.’ But if you see the site with the trees located on it, psychologically that makes you realize, oh, ‘I can make that an element of the thing I’m going to build out.’” Too often designers view a site as a blank slate.

As for how to deal with the tree code, he finds most developers like straightforward routes rather than discretionary options. They tend to throw their hands up after a quick code read, and assume it’s easier to pay a mitigation fee than to preserve a tree, says Spevak. Those who read the code carefully, as he does, or who pay someone else to do so—Title 11 is complicated—will find more leeway than at first glance, he says. These days, Spevak makes use of the code’s relatively looser “performance path,” for which he is willing to pay his arborist to create alternative root zone protection plans.

Toward More Large Trees

Saving large trees in the right of way should receive as much attention as private-property trees in development situations, argues Spevak. “The city could and should do a lot more to get trees into the right of way for eco-system reasons.” At Cully Grove, he was required to install a large curbside bioswale. Yet the weighty deodar cedar that he protected through the sidewalk bump-out “gets zero credit” for its stormwater management services in right-of-way decision making. “The city’s been claiming they’ll start doing that [giving credit for such trees] but I don’t see on the ground that they’ve changed their approach,” he says.

As a member of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission, which holds public hearings and makes recommendations to City Council on tree code changes, Spevak is well-versed in Title 11 weaknesses. He supports quashing fee exemptions for developers on industrial and commercial sites because of the low-income people living near these zones. And he wants the city to examine lowering the diameter threshold--currently at 36 inches and up--at which per-inch-fees are charged for scrapping trees. (City entities are now studying both changes, as well as a broader Title 11 review.) Even when the tree code was adopted, he notes, people knew it would have to be tuned up after seeing how it worked on the ground.

Spevak goes the extra mile to save existing large trees. At the same time, he says, to lower carbon impact, it’s important to provide housing in walkable, close-in locations. He therefore feels there’s a limit to how much stricter the tree code can get, “because if certain areas become undevelopable, or changes drive cost up a lot, that’s a problem too.”

What his work reveals is that for those who see the aesthetic, health, environmental, and economic benefits of trees, designing with them in mind can be done.