[milomilo]

While it's sad to lose trees, the alternative could be worse IMO. To keep those trees, they would have had to have much larger setbacks than what they ended up with, which are already large (to provide room for road expansion, I assume). I think it's unusually brave of them to allow the setback distance and built form to change piecemeal like that. In most NA cities (Calgary for sure), if you have a block of SFHs, it's a block of SFHs forever, perhaps with some townhouses of the same form thrown in slowly over time. The only way it changes is if the whole block rots enough that the whole thing can be demolished and started over.