"I used to look out over majestic trees, and now I am sandwiched between concrete walls." That's how Linden Street resident Amy Hertzig described her block to the Miami City Commission this year, and if you've walked past a bare lot on Irvington Avenue, Emathla Street, or El Prado Boulevard lately, you already know what she means.
The Irvington Avenue case is the one people keep bringing up. A live oak there, 52 feet tall and 30 inches in diameter, had grown up alongside the neighborhood for decades. City records flagged it as being in poor condition and cleared it for removal to make way for a new home. Chris Pruett, a certified arborist who grew up on that same street and moved back to it as an adult, didn't buy the diagnosis. He's spent this year watching more of that story repeat across the Grove than at any point he can remember, and he's not alone in noticing.
The Number Behind the Missing Shade
Here's the figure that makes this more than one bad year for one old oak: Miami's Historic and Environmental Preservation Board, the body that hears resident appeals of tree removal permits, took up exactly one appeal in all of 2025. Since January of this year, it's heard at least fourteen, according to Coconut Grove Spotlight's tracking. The pace forced the board to double its meeting schedule from monthly to twice a month, and even that hasn't been enough. On July 22 and 23, the board sat through eight hours on eight separate appeals in front of a standing-room crowd of more than 100 people. It didn't adjourn until roughly 2 a.m.
That's not a story about trees getting sicker faster. It's a story about a review process that changed shape underneath residents without most of them noticing until the chainsaws showed up.
Why the Inspection Disappeared Before the Trees Did
Internal city records reviewed by Coconut Grove Spotlight and WLRN show that as far back as early 2024, while officials in Miami's Building Department were drafting a broader rewrite of the tree ordinance, they were also quietly revising the internal procedures for how removal permits get approved. One of the changes: reviewing officers no longer conduct site visits before issuing a tree removal permit. The application gets evaluated on paper. Nobody has to walk the lot and look at the tree in question before signing off on taking it down.
That single procedural shift explains a lot of what's playing out on HEP Board agendas this year. When the person approving a removal never has to see the tree, the burden of catching a mistaken or misleading application shifts entirely to neighbors, who typically don't find out until the notice goes up or the crew arrives. Filing an appeal after the fact is now functionally the inspection step that used to happen quietly before the fact. As Pruett put it, watching a healthy oak get labeled diseased on his own street: "The way you destroy a forest is to cut down a tree one at a time."
Who Gets to Object, and Who Doesn't
The clearest illustration of how the process actually works this year happened on Grand Avenue, where the city approved removal of 57 trees, some retroactively, to make way for a temporary pickleball and padel facility with 12 courts. Resident Nicole Gazo filed an appeal in March arguing the city's code doesn't allow tree removal for a project operating under a temporary special-events permit. The board never got to that argument. An assistant city attorney advised the board that Gazo was neither a City of Miami resident nor an abutting property owner, which disqualified her from bringing the appeal at all. The permit stood, on a technicality, without the merits ever being weighed.
Compare that to what happened on Swanson Avenue and El Prado Boulevard, where residents who did have standing filed appeals the same spring. The board unanimously overturned the Swanson Avenue permit, rejecting the property owner's argument that two mature specimen trees posed a safety and traffic hazard. On El Prado, where a permit would have removed 15 trees, including ten hardwoods, board members pushed back hard on a mitigation plan that clustered replacement plantings out of public view along the back of the lot, and ultimately sided with the residents challenging it.
The pattern across this year's cases:
- Irvington Avenue (South Grove): a 52-foot oak flagged for removal ahead of new construction, contested by neighbors and the street's own resident arborist.
- Grand Avenue: a 57-tree removal for a pickleball and padel complex, appeal dismissed on standing, not on merit.
- Swanson Avenue: a two-tree removal permit unanimously overturned by the HEP Board.
- El Prado Boulevard (South Grove): a 15-tree removal permit reversed after board members rejected the proposed mitigation plan.
- Charles Avenue (West Grove): one of the city's oldest designated historic streets, where residents point to new construction that clears lots well beyond what the neighborhood's conservation district was written to allow.
- Emathla Street (North Grove): 11 trees, including four oaks, approved for removal in April.
Whether a resident's tree survives this year has as much to do with who's standing next to it and whether they qualify to file, as it does with the tree's actual condition.
Two Numbers That Can't Both Be True
While all of this was playing out block by block, District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo's office published its own analysis in August claiming the Grove and eleven other neighborhoods gained a net 25.8 acres of tree canopy between 2023 and 2025. If you've watched a lot get cleared on your own street this year, that number probably doesn't match what you've seen, and there's a reason for that. The city's analysis wasn't built from a field survey. It came from Google's Environmental Insights Explorer, a free tool that estimates canopy coverage using aerial imagery and artificial intelligence, not from anyone walking the neighborhood with a measuring tape.
The last time anyone actually did that kind of ground-truthed count was 2020, when researchers from the University of Florida and Florida International University conducted Miami-Dade's official Urban Tree Canopy Assessment. That study put countywide canopy at roughly 20 percent, essentially unchanged from a similar assessment in 2016, and estimated Coconut Grove specifically at around 39 percent, among the most heavily forested parts of the county. That number is now more than five years old, predates this year's surge in removal permits entirely, and nobody has repeated it since. Both the city and the county have set a public goal of 30 percent canopy coverage by 2030. Tree advocates including Sandy Moise of the Sierra Club Miami Group have called for a fresh scientific assessment rather than an AI estimate, and as of late August, Pardo's office had declined to answer questions about the methodology, saying it was waiting on other studies to finish first.
What's Left to Watch
The city's newly formed Tree Ordinance Advisory Committee, created by the commission in May after more than a year of delay, held its first meeting in July and is now roughly two months into an eight-month review. It wrapped its fifth and final public workshop on August 20 at The Hangar at Regatta Harbour on Pan American Drive, and it's due to present recommendations to the City Commission by March 2027. Separately, longtime civic activist Andy Parrish has asked commissioners to fix the language in the NCD-3 zoning code meant to protect trees, which a 2019 court ruling left effectively unenforceable. As of late July, Commissioner Pardo hadn't publicly responded.
None of this resolves what's already happened on Irvington Avenue or Grand Avenue this year. But it does mean the rules that will govern the next round of removals are still being written, in public meetings, over the next several months. If your own street still has its canopy, the HEP Board's twice-monthly agenda is now the closest thing the Grove has to an early warning system, and it's public.
Amy Hertzig's line about being sandwiched between concrete walls wasn't really about one tree. It was about noticing, mid-sentence at a commission meeting, that the shade she'd taken for granted for years had a paper trail behind its disappearance, one that most of her neighbors never got to read until it was too late to matter.
If you're weighing a move within the Grove, or wondering how a specific block's tree canopy and zoning history might affect a property you're watching, Silvia Coltrane and the Coltrane Miami Group know this neighborhood's streets, not just its listings. Request a Confidential Consultation to talk through what's actually happening on the ground before you make a decision.
