It’s my tree. Why can’t I cut it down?

This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab teen investor account, teens can gain hands on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. This is Planet Money from NPR. The day that Sarah Bond finally became a homeowner, she'd almost given up. It was 2021. The housing market was red hot. She and her husband Joel kept getting outbid. They were starting to think maybe their family would never have a place they could make their own, place where she and Joel could plant blueberry bushes, place where their daughter Jojo could raise baby ducks and chickens. Then she got a call from her realtor. She left a voice mail, and she said congratulations. And I was like, what? And it started like I was like, no way. And I told my husband, he was like, are you serious? Are you kidding? The house that was now their house was white with black trim, two stories tall. It was nicer than she ever thought she could afford. And it was located in their dream neighborhood on a tree lined street in Southwest Portland. She remembers when they first went to visit the area. And as soon as we open the doors of the car, we just hear, like, an eruption of children laughing and screaming. And and there was this all these kids, like, rolling down the hill, and they're just, like, tumbling all over each other. And it's just, like, magic. Sarah's favorite part about their new home was the huge yard. She used to work at a garden center, and she loved how many plants and trees were grown around their home. About a week or two after they move in, Sarah's in the backyard when she realizes that one of the trees is growing at a kind of weird angle. It's this huge Douglas fir. It's like a 100 feet tall, and it is so big that standing in the backyard, she couldn't even see the top of it, and it is leaning towards the house. When I first noticed the lean, my immediate feeling was like, oh, my gosh. This should have been taken out, like, yesterday. Yeah. Like, this is really, scary. It was like this tree of Damocles just looming over them. Sarah kept picturing it falling. This tree wasn't gonna, like, fall and, you know, put a hole in our roof. It was gonna fall, and we would be lucky to walk away. Sarah and Joel start looking into how to remove a 100 foot tall tree from your backyard. They find out that they need to get approval from the city because in Portland, like in many places, anytime you wanna remove a large tree, you have to apply for a permit. And Sarah's like, well, clearly this …