Pull a Problem Up By Its Roots
Light Conversational — Personal Narrative
Lessons from a Real Estate Journey
Within the first week of our having moved in, our tenant texted me that she was having a backup in her bathroom. I was incredulous.
She delicately explained that backups were, in fact, a very regular occurrence on the property. “It’s almost like the tree knew you guys were looking at the place,” she said.
The tree she was referring to was one of two giant ficus trees that had some of the most invasive root systems known to the history of city-dwellers snaking under our property and lapping up sweet sewage water from our sewage lines. Lucky us, though. According to our tenant, “We didn’t have any backups the whole time you were looking. But usually, we get them every couple months.”
We called a plumber who, for a whopping $500, hydro-jetted the entire pipe, removing all of the roots by blasting water through the pipe at high speed. We hoped that by taking the more thorough route we would buy ourselves more time before another backup. Meanwhile, we scoffed at the previous owner who had apparently only snaked the pipes.
“This plumber definitely did a more thorough job,” our renter commented to us when he left after several hours of the hydro-jetting treatment. When we asked him how soon the roots would grow back, he said it would depend on the tree.
“Sometimes it can take a year. Sometimes it’s sooner, like six or eight months.”
Imagine our surprise when, two and half months later, we got a call again. “There’s another backup,” Tamika said. I groaned. My husband was unemployed, we were paying our mortgage while trying to prepare to renovate a property, and we already had what felt like very expensive maintenance costs on our plate.
But far worse than the immediate cost was the sense of dread that was quickly starting to fill me. I started to project into the future. What will happen when we have even more people living here, running water through the pipes? How much of our precious cash flow is going to go to stupid hydro-jetting every few months?? Is the property even worth keeping at all, I began to wonder – no longer surprised that the seller had parted with it at such a reduced rate.
The obvious thing to do was remove the giant ficus. Though I wasn’t even confident that would work – convinced as I was that the roots might live on beyond the tree and continue to torture and harass us from their soily graves. But removing the tree might solve the problem – if only we could do it!
But the tree belonged to the all-powerful city of Los Angeles, who, in their apparent lack of arboral awareness, planted giant ficus trees all over the place, neglected to prune them, and then neglected Los Angeles residents who called to complain that the trees were tearing up their sidewalks and interfering with their pipes.
But as if simple neglect weren’t bad enough, they didn’t even allow residents to spend their own money to remove these beastly trees. Instead, as long as a tree was healthy, they treated it as an integral resident of the “Los Angeles Forest” (< what is that??) while the human residents of Los Angeles City (a real place) were forced to pay for the consequences.
A third backup came, just a few months later. Oh God, Oh God, this is so much worse than we imagined, I thought. We had applied for a permit to remove the tree, which had been denied, and my husband was now regularly watching youtube videos about how we might poison the tree or get rid of it through more insidious means. We spoke with an expert plumber who told us our case was worse than the worst cases he had ever seen. “Back-ups every two-and-a-half months?? Wow, in my thirty years as a plumber, the worst I’ve seen is every six months.” We would rather not have been deserving of that trophy…
Desperate for solutions, we began to explore alternative ways to deal with our horrible root problem. I stumbled on root killer, a product you flush down the toilet and which supposedly kills all the roots in the pipes. We flushed it down the toilet of our tenant’s house – hoping it might spare us the expense of more hydro-jetting. Maybe if we just use root killer every month, we can keep this problem under control? I thought. I quickly began calculating costs, and felt that to keep back-ups at bay, it would be worth a $20 monthly investment.
I made a note in my calendar when we would have expected a backup to come and then waited to see if the root killer deterred it. Within a few short weeks of the noted date, the backup came again.
In the meantime, the tree became a thing of nightmares in my mind. It was a massive roadblock. It would impede everything. We couldn’t create comfortable, profitable apartments while it was here. And it was starting to feel like in this battle, the tree was going to win…and all of our hard work would go to the toilet. Ten years of saving and investing…and we’d have to sell the property, and probably take a net loss once you took all the fees into account. I began to feel truly hopeless.
Unbeknownst to me, my husband had been calling urban forestry on a nearly daily basis. He had started to make friends with Myra, a city worker who also happened to live a few short blocks away from us. He continued to call, to tell her of our ficus woes, to beg her for her help to move the immovable city.
One day, Akiva handed me a small scrap of paper with a number scribbled on it. “This is the head of urban forestry,” he said.
“Who?”
“The head of urban forestry. I’ve been calling the city for weeks. Myra finally gave it to me.” I was filled with admiration for my husband’s dogged determination.
“His name is Dean. He’s going to come by on Thursday morning to look at the tree,” he went on. “When he’s here, you say to him this: ‘How can we get a permit to remove the tree?’ Don’t ask him IF we can get a permit. Just ask him, ‘How can we?’” I was ready to obey.
Thursday morning came and at the appointed hour, I walked down our cracked driveway, heavily pregnant with our third child, to the front of the property to meet Dean, the big poncho, the head of urban forestry himself. I shared our sob story.
“We get backups every two and a half months,” I said. “Our plumber has never seen a root problem this bad.” And then, following my husband’s instructions, “How can we get a permit to get this tree removed?”
Dean looked up and down at the tree with a grimace and said, “I’ll tell you how to get this damn tree removed. You submit an application to repair the sidewalk AND the driveway apron, and they’ll give you a permit to remove the tree.”
In other words, as long as we were doing the city’s dirty work by fixing the stuff they should have fixed themselves…and doing that dirty work required pruning the roots of the trees to a dangerous extent…they would allow this “resident” of the Los Angeles Forest to be expunged. How truly magnanimous.
“Um, do we…actually have to repair the sidewalk and the driveway apron?” I asked tentatively, wary of taking even more projects onto our plate, but not wishing to expose myself for the loophole-searching citizen that I was.
“Nope. Just apply. They can’t let you do the driveway without removing the tree. So you’ll get a permit to remove the tree that way.”
My heart must have started to sing at this moment. Could it really be that simple?
Dean took his leave of me and I quickly called Akiva to share the good news. We submitted the new permit request that night and several months later, we received the tree removal permit, Dean’s signature shining in digital ink. Eager to avoid more hydro-jetting expenses, we started getting quotes for its removal immediately, eventually going with a company that promised to remove the monstrosity in two days pat, including grinding the stump.
The tree guys showed up one morning and began removing the tree branches which they fed into a tree shredder that reduced the massive arms of the tree into piles of thickly shaven sawdust.
Our neighbors all came out to share in the moment. “How did you get the permit to remove it??” Our neighbor across the street asked. She was thrilled that the tree would soon be gone.
“That’ll get rid of a lot of bird poop,” another neighbor commented.
“I admire your husband,” said our elderly neighbor next door. She experienced sewage problems too and had agreed to chip in on the cost of the tree removal. “Your husband works very hard,” she said. I didn’t tell her my own part in…um…encouraging him.
Though owners down the block had been trimming the giant ficuses in front of their homes, (our street has several of these trees), no one else had done this. No one else had managed to wrestle the right from the city to remove the massive problem from their midst.
And indeed, the removal had the desired effect. Though I had been concerned about zombie root systems continuing to haunt us, after the tree was removed, we did not experience a single backup. The pipes were free at last.
Tone: Light Conversational
Text Type: Personal Narrative
