Hackensack, NJ Invasive Plant Rules: Tree-of-Heaven Removal (2026)

The tree-of-heaven ban arrived with Ordinance No. 41-2022, adopted September 6, 2022 as an amendment to Section 162-3 of Chapter 162, Trees, the same section that has restricted poplar, catalpa and willow plantings near public streets since the 1980s. Effective October 1, 2022, no person may sell, plant or knowingly propagate ailanthus altissima anywhere in Hackensack, public or private property alike, and the ban reaches replanting after an existing specimen dies or is removed. 2A(1) generally bars removing any tree over six inches in diameter from a required planted or buffer area without Planning Board approval, but it carves out invasive species such as tree of heaven from that protection, on the condition that removal "prohibit regrowth or spread," which for ailanthus altissima specifically means pulling the stump to limit resprouting.

That landscaping standard is enforced through the Planning Board's site-plan process, where planted and buffer areas are subject to inspection and approval before a permanent certificate of occupancy issues. The Section 162-3 sale-and-planting ban, by contrast, has no penalty clause of its own within Article I of Chapter 162, so it falls to the Code's general penalty provision at Section 1-15.