Pressure washing costs in Atlanta

Atlanta is a city of trees, and your house shares the yard with them. A tree canopy study the city commissioned from Georgia Tech found that in October 2008, trees covered 47.9 percent of the land inside city limits. Leaves, seeds and pollen come down on roofs, gutters, decks and driveways, and the shady side of a house stays damp longer after rain. That's the side where green film tends to show up first.

That 47.9 percent was the highest share in the nation among cities that had run the same kind of canopy count. The study also found the cover thickest along the water. Within 100 feet of a stream, canopy averaged 65 percent across the city, and it reached 80 percent along North Utoy Creek. If your back deck faces a creek, it may spend much of the day under leaves. Georgia Tech has redone the count since, in 2014 and 2018, and its online map shows the canopy for your own neighborhood.

How much shade you live under depends on where you live. The same 2008 study found single-family residential land was 61 percent covered by trees, against 20 percent for commercial land. Downtown and the neighborhoods around it had less than 5 percent. Several neighborhoods in the north and southwest, especially along Nancy Creek and Utoy Creek, topped 70 percent.