I learned this on a senior living project in Danville.
We got brought in early, before the site plan got locked in. The site sat on three acres next to seven single-family homes. Mature trees everywhere. The kind of trees that define a neighborhood. The kind people have watched grow for twenty years. We were going to take some of them down. Plant new ones. And the neighbors were already concerned before we’d even introduced ourselves.
Most landscape architects, even brought in early, would have just drawn a tree plan. Marked what comes out, what goes in, sent it to the architect. We knew that wasn’t going to work. The neighbors didn’t care about our plan. They cared about what they could see from their living rooms.
So we did something different.
We hired an arborist. We always do on our projects, but on this one we brought one in before the formal planning process even started. Then I went to each of those seven neighbors’ houses. Knocked on doors. Stood in their backyards. Stood in their living rooms. Looked at what they were actually worried about losing.
That changed everything.
One neighbor had a sightline to the hills through a specific gap in the trees. Another had privacy concerns from a second-story window. A third was worried about shade on their pool. These weren’t abstract planning commission issues. These were real things, things people lived with every day. And once I understood them, we could design around them.
We took those conversations back into the tree disposition plan. The removal strategy, the planting strategy, all of it. Not to make people happy, exactly. More to be honest about what we were doing and why. We added mitigation measures the neighbors could implement on their own property. We showed exactly which trees were coming out and which were staying. We explained the reasoning for every decision.
Then came the planning commission hearing.
When the commissioners asked about tree removal, which they always do in California, our project manager could say something almost no developer gets to say:
“We met with every affected neighbor. We showed them what we were removing and why. We looked at their property together and discussed impacts.”
That one sentence changed the room.
The commissioners didn’t push back. Not because they didn’t care about trees. They do. It’s because we’d already solved the problem before it became a political issue. The neighbors still had concerns. There was still some opposition. But the tree strategy wasn’t a fight anymore. It was just part of the project narrative.
What happened next is what matters.
Because we’d taken that off the table early, the planning commission could focus on other things. We moved through approvals faster. The project got entitled without the kind of grinding, month-by-month revisions that kill timelines and budgets.
Here’s what I’ve learned watching this play out across our projects.
Landscape architects almost always get pulled in too late. The site plan is locked. The building footprint is set. The budget is allocated. By the time we show up, the landscape is a constraint, not a tool. We’re there to make the building work, not to shape the project’s approval strategy.
That’s backwards.
When we’re in the room while the site plan is being developed, while the budget is being set, we can do something different. We can spot the neighborhood issues before they become planning commission fights. We can design transitions that ease opposition instead of triggering it. We can turn what would have been a year of revisions into a clear path forward.
On the Danville project, that early involvement meant an arborist on the team from day one. It meant understanding the neighborhood before the official process started. It meant designing with the actual concerns of actual people, not a generic checklist of what planning commission might ask.
The result was faster entitlements. Fewer revisions. A clearer story to tell. And a developer who could move on to the next challenge instead of fighting the same one for six months.
Most landscape architects think our job is to make beautiful plans. I think our job is to make projects move. And that only happens if we’re in the room early enough to matter.