We study a restriction of the classical Erd\H{o}s--S\'os problem, the extremal number of trees, to the class of bipartite host graphs, both when only the order of the host is prescribed and when its two part-sizes are fixed. We give natural lower-bound constructions and formulate corresponding linear upper-bound conjectures. We apply a weighted variant of $k$-minimality to prove upper bounds for a broad family of trees including brooms, trees with part-sizes obeying certain inequalities, and all trees on at most seven vertices, resolving part of a problem of Caro, Patk\'os and Tuza up to additive constants. We also relate the fixed-part extremal number of a tree to the ordinary extremal number, and consider an oriented bipartite extremal function analogous to the Zarankiewicz function.
It is demonstrated that local subgraph statistics alone are insufficient to surpass the GV bound in the Hamming case, suggesting that improvements must stem from large-scale structural properties of the space.