What’s the infinitive form of “there is”?

[mariamariamaria]

Hey! I was trying to form a sentence and now I am a little confused. When talking about the existence of something, in an impersonal way, we use there + be, right? Would it be correct to say I think it’s important to have trees in the city? Intuitively, I’d say there + be fits better here (instead of have), but I have no idea how to conjugate this structure after using “to”. Could you help me, please? Thank you in advance!

 

[emsr2d2]

The version with "to have" is absolute fine and natural. However, if you want to use "be", you need to say "It's important for there to be trees in the city".

 

[SoothingDave]

Or "it's important that there be trees."

 

[BobK]

Note that @SoothingDave speaks American English. The subjunctive is much less common in British English. If you said 'It's important that there be trees' in a BE environment you'd sound rather stuffy (My grandfather would have said it, and he was born in the 1870s).

It's not very elegant, but 'It's important for there to be trees' is possible.

(I'm ducking and covering here.)

 

[Piscean]

The subjunctive is much less common in British English.

It is indeed, but some of us still use it if nobody is looking.

 

[BobK]

I've had a look in some corpora, and posted about it here. (It could be improved, but I've got a lot on.)