Florida
At the risk of bringing this thread back to it's pre-scandal level of discourse, Richard Florida has a very good article in today's Globe that, among other things, is a very intelligent rebuttal to those who think de-amalgamation is a solution problem. Personally, I think he's dead on...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...lem-has-grown-past-its-mayor/article15313661/
I agree with Florida's take on de-amalgamation, but his analogies between NYC and Toronto are completely false, which in my mind discredits the whole article. (But I'm not surprised, I've never read anything by Florida that has really impressed me. I don't get why he gets so much attention).
Florida's claim that Ford "rose to power on the basis of the very same divide" than Bill de Blasio, the mayor-elect of New York, is completely absurd.
If you look at the map of Tuesday's election results, you can see that even though De Blasio won an incredible 73%!!! of the vote, his Republican opponent, Joe Lhota actually won in some parts of the city:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/06/who-voted-for-joe-lhota_n_4227989.html
And these are precisely the kind of areas that can be compared to the areas where Rob Ford did well: Staten Island and North Eastern Queens and South Eastern Brooklyn are about the only parts of the city where you can find single-family homes and driveways with SUVs and people who want to drive to work and worry about customer parking. These issues just have no resonance for the rest of the population. Real New Yorkers don't drive. Period. They walk, or take the subway, or hail a cab.
Interestingly, Lhota also did well on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the wealthiest part of the city.
I guess the term "elites" could refer to those people, though I thought Florida preferred to use it to describe the intellectual class. (which overwhelmingly supported de Blasio)
But even so, this glosses over the fact that Bloomberg oversaw the building of a huge network of separated bikelines, for example, and DeBlasio is not about to undo that.