The Philly Tree Coalition, a partnership of residents, nonprofits, and city agencies, released a progress report Thursday marking three years since the city adopted the Philly Tree Plan. Since 2023, the coalition and its partners have planted more than 18,000 new trees and maintained nearly 33,000 new or mature trees, logging upwards of 44,000 hours of maintenance work.

"In these three years, we accomplished a tremendous amount, full stop," said Kiasha Huling, director of the Philly Tree Coalition, at an event announcing the findings. "And we still have a ways to go."

The stakes are high. Between 2008 and 2018, Philadelphia lost 6% of its tree canopy, according to city data. Trees are distributed unequally across the city, with poorer neighborhoods and historically redlined areas having fewer trees—leaving residents there more exposed to dangerous summer heat. The Philly Tree Plan aims to raise the city's overall canopy from 20% to 30% over the next three decades.

The coalition has concentrated planting in "priority areas" identified by the plan—parts of North, Northeast, West, Southwest, and South Philadelphia—where sparse tree cover combines with high heat exposure, poor air quality, and elevated asthma rates.

In South Philadelphia, the nonprofit SEAMAAC has worked with the coalition to bring trees to densely populated blocks. Sabia Afroz, the group's community development program manager, said SEAMAAC planted and is maintaining Japanese maple and cherry trees in Mifflin Square Park, along with persimmon and pomegranate trees in a community garden. Staff who collectively speak more than 55 languages spent over a year engaging business owners along the Seventh Street corridor before several agreed to request trees in front of their storefronts.

"South Philly is absolutely densely populated, [with] row homes and nowhere to go and no trees," Afroz said, calling the progress "amazing."

Through the Department of Commerce's Taking Care of Business program, which pays neighborhood cleaning ambassadors to care for trees, at least 850 new saplings were planted along commercial corridors between 2023 and 2025.

A central focus of the plan is reducing the burden that street trees can place on residents and businesses. Poorly maintained or overly large trees can crack sidewalks and water service lines—repairs that property owners are responsible for—and can discourage people from wanting trees on their blocks. To build trust, several coalition partners, including the Philadelphia Orchard Project and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, began offering stipends to previously unpaid volunteers who plant and maintain trees.

"[It] increases the confidence of residents that someone's taking care of their trees," Huling said. "Where people have previously maybe been opposed to trees on their blocks, they're more amenable to having trees in their neighborhoods, and that's where we need to grow our canopy the most."

Still, volunteers say the city and its large nonprofit partners need to do more to support the critical first few years of a young tree's life. Dennis Dorfman, a volunteer with Friends of Wharton Square Park and Point Breeze Tree Tenders, described hauling buckets of water from a single tap in Wharton Square Park to several recently planted red oaks—a difficult and time-consuming process. He asked coalition leaders at Thursday's event whether the city could provide a water truck or other infrastructure.

"We're at this point where it's sort of difficult to support these larger plantings, support these young trees, through that really important first couple of summers," Dorfman said. "I feel like I need more support."

The progress report also shows no movement on two policy goals: passing a new policy to expand the city's heritage tree preservation law, which requires developers to either keep trees at least two feet wide and on a list of noninvasive species or pay a fee, and increasing incentives for preserving large trees.

"Those goals around policy change are things that take time," Huling said. "It takes political will. It takes civic interest."

The coalition has not yet assessed the city's overall tree canopy coverage and plans to do so in 2028. In the meantime, the work of planting—and keeping alive—the city's next generation of trees continues block by block, with community groups pressing for the resources to match the plan's ambitions.