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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> You'd have thought the people supporting the plan were proposing to kill members' grandchildren.

That's crazy, considering that policy is likely adding an absolutely insane amount to everyone's property values. When NYC re-landscaped The Highline to make it exclusively native plants, property values in the area literally went up 10x.

I live in a HOA, and the first thing I did when I moved in was to dig up all the forsythia along our driveway and replace them with grafted pawpaws. Planting nice trees is the only home improvement you can make where you can spend $50 and add $100,000 to your property value. The returns are literally like getting a chance to go back to 2011 and buy Bitcoin.

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> When NYC re-landscaped The Highline to make it exclusively native plants, property values in the area literally went up 10x.

Any source on this?Because it seems like Highline-adjacent properties probably would’ve seen a pretty good ROI over the past 10 years regardless of what plants were up there.

> Planting nice trees is the only home improvement you can make where you can spend $50 and add $100,000 to your property value. The returns are literally like getting a chance to go back to 2011 and buy Bitcoin.

Any source on this one? I work with arborists and even they’re not quite so gung-ho on promoting this kind of return. And $50 is getting you a sapling that’s going to take (maybe) decades to maximize any return.

https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/the-high-line-s-halo-.... Talks about an apartment that went from $350,000 to 3.15M.

As a more general principle, try to buy any good pawpaw cultivar. If you look peacefulheritage.org, which is probably the top grower in the country, they go one sale 1 day a year and completely sell out in 20 minutes. You need to license the same software that people use to scalp PS5s to even have a chance to buy one. There literally isn't any consumer product on the market that has this high of an asymmetry between supply and demand.

If you go to the estates of any wealthy families, e.g. the Rockefeller estates or the Getty estates or whatever, the one thing they all have in common is really nice trees. Picking out trees for the new Apple campus was the last thing Steve Jobs did before he died. If it's an exaggeration to say that being able to buy nice trees is the entire point of having money, it's probably not by much.

> Talks about an apartment that went from $350,000 to 3.15M.

$350K in 1997 to $3.15M in 2016. Probably hard to find a property in lower Manhattan that didn’t appreciate like that.

> If you go to the estates of any wealthy families, e.g. the Rockefeller estates or the Getty estates or whatever, the one thing they all have in common is really nice trees.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Yeah, I'm sure it was the native plants and not the 100s of millions spent in re-development.

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