Eighty-eight feet tall and 14 feet around, a chinquapin oak on the east side of Van Dyke Avenue in Sterling Heights, Michigan, has stood on its patch of floodplain since before the United States existed. For nearly two years, neighbors feared it would come down for an apartment complex. Under a revised building plan from the Chaldean Community Foundation, the tree known locally as the Sterling Oak will now stay, according to C&G Newspapers’ Sterling Heights Sentry.
The new proposal shrinks the project from a four-story, 80-unit building to a three-story building with 29 apartments, and it puts the oak at the center of the site’s outdoor space. The Sterling Heights City Council has scheduled a public hearing on the revised plan for its Nov. 4 meeting.
A rare oak on two acres of Van Dyke frontage
The tree sits on city-owned land south of Clinton River Road. Residents who first raised the alarm in early 2025 described it to the Sentry as a rare chinquapin oak with a crown spread of 84.5 feet. Certifiers with the Michigan Botanical Society ranked it the seventh-largest of its kind in Michigan, and an International Society of Arboriculture formula put its age at close to 270 years, possibly as many as 300, the paper reported at the time.
Chinquapin oaks are native to the eastern United States and favor alkaline, well-drained soil. They usually top out at 40 to 50 feet in a yard, though they can reach 70 to 80 feet in the wild, according to the Franklin & Marshall College arboretum. Their sweet, half-inch acorns feed birds and mammals, and a tree may take up to 30 years to start producing them. At 88 feet, the Sterling Oak is taller than that wild range…