If you want to plant a tree in the Right-of-Way planting strip between the sidewalk and the street in Tacoma, Washington, you need to get a planting permit. See “Trees in the Right-of-Way” on the City of Tacoma website.

The city maintains lists of pre-approved species you can choose from that serve as recommendations and that will make review easier. Unfortunately, those lists live in a few random PDFs. I wanted to get an easier sense of what these options are, so I had Claude Opus 4.8 build the table below, which is searchable and sortable. This table is based on the 2025 revision of the pre-approved tree lists, so it may be out-of-date if you’re looking at this in 2027 or later.

You can also download the extracted and structured data as JSON here.

Pre-approved trees

Size
Traits

Loading tree data…

Notes

  • Data is from January 2025. The data were extracted from the PDFs on the City of Tacoma’s website, last revised January 30, 2025.
  • Data tweaks. The data has a few quirks — a misspelled species, an evergreen icon on a tree you’d call deciduous, etc. I worked with Claude to fix these; see the full list of corrections below.
  • Definitions. Growth rate and Canopy factor are defined as follows (see 13.01.060.C):

    A method of calculating tree size by taking into account the tree’s mature height, mature crown spread and growth rate. The Canopy Factor is calculated using the following formula: (mature height in feet) x (mature crown spread in feet) x (growth rate number) x 0.01 = Canopy Factor. The growth rate number is 1 for slow growing trees, 2 for moderately growing trees, and 3 for fast growing trees.

    •Large Trees = Canopy Factor greater than 70,

    •Medium Trees = Canopy Factor from 40 to 70,

    •Small Trees = Canopy Factor less than 40.

  • Prohibited trees. There’s also a separate list of not recommended and prohibited trees, which is not included here. At the time of writing, you can find that list here.
Full list of tweaks Claude and I made to the city's data

Data corrections:

  • Misspelled scientific names: Chamaecyparis obstusa → obtusa; Gingko biloba → Ginkgo biloba; Eucalyptus gunni → gunnii; Cladastris kentukea → Cladrastis kentukea; Tillia tomentosa → Tilia tomentosa; Ulmus parviflora → parvifolia; Ulmus caprinifolia × parvifloia → carpinifolia × parvifolia; Cornus kousa × nuttalii → nuttallii.
  • Naming and taxonomy: Crataegus crus-galli var. inermis is corrected to Crataegus crus-galli 'Inermis' — the thornless cockspur hawthorn, where "inermis" is a cultivar rather than a botanical variety; and Cupressus bakeri is updated to its currently accepted name, Hesperocyparis bakeri.
  • Reclassified as evergreen: Four broadleaf evergreens were marked with a deciduous icon in the source: Eucalyptus neglecta (omeo gum), Eucalyptus parvula (small-leaved gum), Quercus ilex (holm oak), and Quercus myrsinifolia (bamboo-leaf oak).
  • Untangled columns: The two Syringa pekinensis rows had the cultivar code ('Morton', DTR 124') sitting in the common-name slot and the trade name in the cultivars slot; I swapped them back. A footnote asterisk was stripped from three large trees (Douglas-fir, coastal redwood, ponderosa pine).
  • Fruit tree canopy factor: The fruit list gives sizes as ranges (e.g. "6–12"); the canopy factor for these is computed from the formula above using the upper end of the range. In addition, the fruit sheet doesn't carry the utility-friendly flag, but I believe all of the dwarf fruit trees are allowed under power lines — so I've marked them as such, with the exception of the fig (Ficus carica) which I'm not sure about.


If you spot any additional errors, please do let me know!