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This is staggering to me for a different reason. Having a single tree cut down (and removed, which I guess they didn’t do) in our neighborhood costs in the vicinity of $4000-$10,000.

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If you have a chainsaw, you can pick the tree, and you're not worried about where the tree will land (it's far enough from anything important), cutting down a tree is pretty quick work. Making it land in a small area is difficult, and removing it is laborious.

$4,000 to $10,000 for a single tree removal is incredibly high. In a very high cost of living area I can have a very large tree removed by a licensed insured removal company, the best in the area, for $1,500.

Are you in the Bay Area? NYC? Those are about the only places I could imagine paying $4k or more.

I suspect over the pandemic and lumber boom, a lot of qualified/insured/bonded arborists ended up getting forestry jobs and in-city arborists became scarce, temporarily anyway. Kinda like what happened to shipping container prices.

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