Parkway Trees: Is It Yours or the Village's?

The tree between your sidewalk and the curb is probably not yours. It is probably the village's, growing in the public right-of-way, and that single fact changes everything about who trims it, who removes it, who pays, and what happens if a limb comes down on your car.

This causes more confusion than any other tree question on the North Shore, because the tree is clearly in front of your house, you mow around it, and nobody ever told you otherwise.

The parkway is public land

Most North Shore streets are laid out the same way: the property line sits behind the sidewalk, not at the curb. The strip between sidewalk and street - the parkway, sometimes called the tree lawn or boulevard - is part of the public right-of-way. The municipality owns it and owns the trees in it.

What that means in practice:

• The village decides whether that tree gets pruned, treated, or removed.
• The village pays for the work on its own trees, out of the forestry budget.
• You cannot hire your own crew to cut, prune, or remove it. No reputable tree service will touch a parkway tree without a village work permit, and the ones that will are the kind you should not be hiring. See how to choose a tree service.
• You generally do maintain the grass around it, which is why everyone assumes it is theirs.

Most North Shore villages also have ordinance protection on parkway trees, meaning damaging one - including by a contractor trenching through its roots during your driveway job - can carry a real penalty assessed against the tree's appraised value.

Where the line actually is

Do not guess from the sidewalk. Two reliable ways to settle it:

Your plat of survey. If you have one from your closing, it shows the property line and the right-of-way width. This is the authoritative document.

Call the village. Every North Shore public works or forestry department will tell you, usually in one phone call, whether a specific tree is village-owned and whether it is on their inventory. Most of them maintain a tree inventory with species, size, and condition for every parkway tree in town, and some publish it as a public map.

Edge cases worth knowing:

• Corner lots often have parkway on two sides, which doubles the number of village trees you are living with.
• Streets with no sidewalk still usually have a right-of-way that extends past the curb. No sidewalk does not mean no parkway.
• A tree straddling the line is the genuinely contested case, and it gets settled by the village forester on site.
• Private roads and some unincorporated pockets in places like Mettawa, Bannockburn, and parts of Long Grove follow different rules entirely, and the tree may well be yours.

Getting a village tree handled

The process is roughly the same everywhere:

1. Call public works or forestry and report the specific tree and the specific problem - deadwood over the sidewalk, a crack in the trunk, a limb hanging over the driveway.
2. A village forester inspects it. Most towns will come out within a couple of weeks, faster if you describe an actual hazard.
3. It goes on a list. Routine pruning runs on a cycle, often every five to eight years by district. Hazard work gets prioritized separately.
4. Hazard trees jump the queue. A village will remove a genuinely dangerous parkway tree promptly, because the liability is theirs.

Two things speed this up considerably. Be specific and factual - "there is a 6-foot crack in the main stem at about 10 feet, on the street side" gets a different response than "the tree looks bad." And take photographs, especially of deadwood over a sidewalk or a split union, and reference them when you call.

If you believe a parkway tree is a hazard and the village has declined to act, you can have your own arborist consultation done from your property and submit the written assessment. A documented third-party opinion changes the conversation, and it also creates a record of notice if the tree later fails.

Who pays when it falls

The general rule in Illinois turns on notice and negligence, not on ownership alone.

• A healthy village tree that comes down in a storm is usually treated as an act of nature. Your homeowners policy handles the damage to your property, subject to your deductible. The village is typically not liable.
• A village tree the village knew was hazardous and did not act on is a different situation. That is where your documented report, with a date, matters enormously.
• Damage to your car, fence, or roof goes through your own insurance first in nearly every case. Does homeowners insurance cover tree removal covers how those claims actually work.
• Debris cleanup for a village tree on public land is the village's. Debris from a village tree that landed in your yard is a grayer area and varies by town.

The practical advice: if a parkway tree near you looks dangerous, report it in writing and keep the confirmation. That one email is the difference between a storm claim and a negligence claim.

Your tree, the village's rules

The reverse case trips people up too. A tree in your front yard, clearly on your property, may still be subject to a village removal permit for a healthy tree over a certain diameter. Several North Shore towns require one, and the permit sometimes carries a replanting condition. Dead and hazardous trees are usually exempt or expedited, but "usually" is not "always." Do you need a permit to remove a tree covers the town-by-town picture.

One more overlap worth flagging: a tree on your property whose branches reach the power lines in the parkway is in utility territory, and that work follows a different process entirely. See trees near power lines.

And if the tree in question is on the line with a neighbor rather than the village, the rules are different again - your neighbor's tree over your yard covers that.

The short version

1. The tree between the sidewalk and the curb is probably the village's. Confirm with your plat of survey or one phone call.
2. You cannot hire a crew for it, and you should not try.
3. Report problems specifically and in writing, with photos. Keep the confirmation.
4. Your own front-yard tree may still need a village permit to remove.

Parkway tree rules vary town to town across Evanston, Wilmette, Winnetka, Glenview, Skokie, and Park Ridge. If you are not sure whether the tree you are worried about is yours or the village's, request a free on-site estimate - sorting that out is the first thing a crew lead does on site, and it costs you nothing to find out.