A Los Angeles mobility nonprofit has picked a fight with one of the city's most recognizable symbols, launching a social media campaign that brands palm trees a “water-guzzling, fire-prone scam” that provides almost no real shade. Streets For All is calling on the city to swap out its palms for broad-canopy trees like sycamores, arguing the switch would actually cool down Los Angeles streets instead of just decorating them.
The campaign, first reported by the New York Post, comes from a group founded by Michael Schneider, who has argued the city should replace palm trees with species native to Southern California that provide genuine shade. Streets For All has criticized palm trees for consuming large amounts of water while offering little shade and posing dangers during fires and high winds, specifically pointing to stretches like Sunset Boulevard where the group says palms do little to cool pedestrians below.
A Data-Backed Case Against the Palm
The group's framing isn't just rhetorical flair — it lines up with research that's circulated for years among urban foresters. Shade trees across Los Angeles provide more than 2.3 million square feet of canopy cover citywide, while palm trees account for just 321,857 square feet despite lining major corridors, according to urban forestry data reported by the Los Angeles Times in October 2023. That same reporting found that broad-leaf species like ficus and rosewood can lower surrounding air temperatures by 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, while palm trees reduce ambient temperatures by less than 1 degree.
The city itself has quietly moved in this direction for two decades. Los Angeles officially restricted new plantings of Mexican fan palms along its streets back in 2006, and the municipal nonprofit City Plants now offers free public street-tree giveaways, per the Los Angeles Times. Compounding the shift, university arborists with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources have discussed threats to Los Angeles's aging palms, including red date palm weevils.
A Manufactured Skyline From the Great Depression
Los Angeles's palm landscape includes non-native Mexican fan palms and date palms. Tens of thousands of non-native Mexican fan palms and date palms were imported and planted in Los Angeles during a Great Depression relief program in the 1930s, employing hundreds of unemployed workers to project a tropical image ahead of the 1932 Summer Olympics, according to background reported by PBS SoCal. Los Angeles is now preparing to host the Olympics again in 2028, a milestone Streets For All has tied into the broader push for shade infrastructure across the city.
Reports have examined how tree shade is distributed across Los Angeles neighborhoods, according to DOMUS. Separate regional forestry data from 2024 examined tree canopy in Los Angeles neighborhoods, per reporting from Knock LA. A study commissioned by City Plants examined Los Angeles's urban-forestry spending, according to El País.
The Palm Fight's Political Roots
Streets For All's timing is inseparable from Los Angeles politics. The group has endorsed City Councilmember Nithya Raman's 2026 mayoral bid over incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, praising Raman's record on bike lanes, public transit, and street redesigns and describing her as a citywide leader on safer streets. Streets For All is also spending money on attack ads against Bass, according to the Post's reporting, while promoting what it calls a transportation revolution built around more bus lanes, protected bike lanes, and wider sidewalks.
Streets For All says it has not coordinated the palm-tree campaign with Raman's campaign directly, and Raman's campaign did not immediately respond to the Post's request for comment. Raman, who supports bike lanes, bus shelters, faster public transit, and Measure HLA, has increasingly clashed with Bass this election cycle — Hoodline previously reported on how she rips Bass over Boyle Heights fire and the city's homelessness response. Measure HLA, which voters approved and Streets For All supported, requires the city to install street-safety upgrades when it repaves roads.
The mayoral race has also scrambled labor alliances that once looked solid for Bass. UNITE HERE Local 11 recently endorsed Nithya Raman, following the Los Angeles Carpenters Union's earlier break with Bass, even though L.A. County's broader labor coalition had backed the incumbent mayor back in February. Former LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner has also entered the race, further complicating a contest that now touches everything from union politics to, apparently, which trees line the city's boulevards.
