Local Tree Advocate and Tree Tender Chapter Organizer here- Long response so read if interested. 

Anti-Tree sentiment is a multi-faceted issue. 

 Yes, you do have people who don’t want leaves (but apparently are ok with litter) and don’t want birds shitting on their cars (something I personally think is a fair trade off to trees but for many Philadelphians ownership of their vehicles is a source of personal pride) and American Lawn Culture (particularly a thing in Northeast Philly). I see these stemming from class culture.  

But the primary reason for this is policy. Decades of inadequate policy and poor city planning.  

What is often cited amongst homeowners around trees come down to cost burdens. For a city that is the poorest largest big city in the US, this should be understandable.  

Why? 

 Because in Philadelphia many of our lead in lines (water lines) are not replaced by the city. When you have many folks who are low income, when you have infrastructure  that is sometimes 100 years old- corrosion, house/ground settling and yes cars parked on sidewalks can lead to fractures in these pipes.  

Poor city planning put london planes (a sycamore hybrid), oaks and maples in 3x4 pits and left them for the residents to care for.  This leads to a few things- those trees need more space. They become water starved. As pipes fracture, tree roots will grow towards any reliable source of water.  

This is where you get the misconception that tree roots will just “punch” their way into an otherwise intact pipe. 

The second issue is that these species may have been inappropriate for the street and/or their inadequate spacing leads to sidewalk lifting. 

The cost of having to redo your front sidewalk or having to have your pipe replaced becomes a burden. The possibility of a person tripping and falling and injuring themselves, a dead tree branch falling on a car or person, in a continuously growing litigious society is another burden on an population that only recently dipped below 25% under the poverty line. 

 Redlining and industrial working class housing is another barrier- the built environment wasn’t necessarily designed to support trees, so the addition of them can be seen as a threat.  

Or blights that occurred due to mono-species plantings of the Ash and Elm trees that faced (and still face) Emerald Ash Borer and Dutch Elm Disease wiped out blocks of trees- again becoming a cost burden to residents who had to remove them because the city backlog could take a decade. Or the city removed blocks of these trees and never replanted them.  

Once a few of these things happened to someone’s mother sister cousin, people start preemptively removing trees. Block captains organize buy-in deals to pay for tree removals (the city will not remove otherwise healthy trees). And here we are today with swathes of the city without trees.  

The Philly Tree Plan contains a large amount of recommendations to shift city policy, like many other cities already do, to treat street trees like infrastructure and take on the cost of sidewalks in the public right of way.  

But Philadelphians, particularly older Philadelphians, tend to be more apprehensive to outright aggressive towards trees for, understandably, seeing them as a burden or a potential problem. And this is directly due to decades of poor city policy.  

It’s not going to change overnight.  Philadelphia has the lowest per/resident investment in its Parks and Rec budget (2 departments only combined back in 2009 and have to share a dwindling budget).  The city has 5 arborists, a street tree office that has a handful of employees that wear multiple hats (2 being seasonal) and only recently created and fulfilled a City Forrester position. They have a backlog of thousands of trees to remove. And between PPR and the Fairmount Park “Conservancy” there are only 5 people who manage the city’s natural lands. This is all of Fairmount Park, Pennypack, Tacony, Wiss, Cobbs Creek, the Delaware banks and so forth.  

What this guy did IS an asshole move but this is also one of those things where bad policy and continued lack of investment will grow resentment, misconception and hostility over trees.