Vestavia Hills, AL Tree Protection: Parkway Planting (2026)

The City folds its street-tree requirement into Article 6 of the Zoning Ordinance, inside the design checklist for the MXD Planned Community Mixed Use District. 10 directs the Planning Commission to apply ten numbered review criteria, covering uses, site planning, building height and streetscape design, whenever it reviews the Master Development Plan for a proposed mixed-use project. Item 4, Streetscape Design, sets the sidewalk and planting standards together: sidewalks must run continuously along every street frontage, connect to adjacent public sidewalks, measure at least five feet wide in residential portions of the project and eight feet wide in commercial portions, and sit behind a vertical curb separating them from the roadway.

Subsection (d) then requires a tree lawn, regularly spaced tree wells, planter boxes, or on-street parking as the buffer between that roadway and the sidewalk, and subsection (e) requires planting strips and street trees as required in the City Public Works Manual, the technical manual the City Engineer's office maintains for construction specifications. 4, a developer proposes the streetscape and tree layout as part of the plan the Commission reviews, and the Commission may condition or reject approval on compliance with the checklist. There is no dollar figure or spacing table printed in this subsection: the Public Works Manual, not the Zoning Ordinance text itself, carries the specifications for the trees. The requirement applies only within land designated MXD; it is not a citywide parkway-tree mandate for single-family lots.