May...er...I have more hip-hop please?

Who better to turn around a city that has steadily declined for 70 years and in the past four years been led by a mayor more engaged in graft than progress than... that same mayor. (re)Introducing the "hip-hop mayor," Kwame Kilpatrick.
I honestly don't have too much of a problem with the guy. At least he's likeable, which is something pretty important for mayors. Unfortunately, likeability itself doesn't bring in much money. The problem with cities like Detroit, as my colleague Lyke Thompson at Wayne State University points out, is that running a city with a huge deficit is a tough task. Detroit, of course, has been running a deficit ever since mass-migration to suburbia began in the 1960's and with it, the tax base. Kilpatrick's victory is no doubt a victory for urban resentment, as this story which quotes my uncle, Professor Mike Whitty, shows. How to turn things around? It's going to take a lot more than a likeable mayor, that's for sure.