Group looking to keep the 'forest' in the Forest City

Jenna Goodhand is questioning why the City of London has a tree protection by-law in the first place.

"All over the city there has been neighbourhoods popping up that have no natural settings," she said."Are we really protecting the trees in our city, or are we putting housing and development before that?"

Goodhandis a personal life coach and member of The Hive, a business cooperative community located on Wharncliffe Road South, where members rent a collective space and are able to draw on each others' skills to help growtheir businesses.

The reason she and other members of The Hive are questioning the rules meant to protect London's urban canopyis because SiftonProperties is in the midst of clearcuttingabout 500 treeseast of them in a locationthe city lists asone of London's "protected tree areas."

"Those trees are in a tree protection zone, according to the city map," said Franck Arroyos, a chartered accountant and the man who owns the farm The Hive calls home.

Arroyos' property is a lone holdout. A thin, 10-acre slice of land jutting into asprawling 140-acre plot slated for development, that will one day be chock-a-block with family homes, double-car garages and serpentine suburban streets.

Arroyos said removing the treeswill fundamentally change the look, feel and character of his property.

However because Siftonfiled the proper paperwork with the city's urban forestry and development services department, which included a tree assessment, it is exempt from the "protected tree area" inthe by-law.

Arroyos, on the other hand, isn't.

"It took me three months just to get a dead tree cut down," he said. "It was last year, I started in the summer and finally got approval in the fall."

"I don't understand it," he said. "I don't understand how the city can say 'we're a green city and we're going to protect the trees' and then a developer can say 'well, these things are in the way of the development, so we're going to cut them down.'"

"I don't know if this city is all talk or not," he said.

It's a question that's come to a head just as Siftonbegan felling trees just east of his property late last week, something that took many of the tenants at The Hive by surprise, according to Jenna Goodhand.

"We were out here doing an event when we heard the chainsaws," she said."We weren't told these trees were coming down when they came down."

Since then, both Sifton and the entrepreneurs at The Hive have met to discuss the trees. Franck Arroyos said Sifton has agreed to look at the trees and transfer as many of them as it could to his property in order to preserve its leafy character.

"We tried," he said. "Sifton said they would like to transplant as many trees as they could, but those will be the younger ones that will be able to withstand that, the bigger mature trees, they basically said no."

While Arroyos said he appreciates Siftongoing out of its way totransplantyounger trees as part of reforestation, he would like to see London incorporate something to protect mature trees in itstree protection by-law.

"There should be something," he said. "You can't just grow a 100-year-old tree. There got to be some respect for that, but I don't know. I don't know how to work any magic here. There just should be something to address that."

CBCNews reached out to SiftonProperties for comment Monday, but the company did not return calls.