A year ago, who knew that a political scandal in Detroit's city hall would result in such a sweeping change for the city?

But if there's anything Motown is good for it's being full of surprises, and voters (92,000 in a city of 821,000) decided to hand us a new one by electing NBA Hall of Famer Dave Bing its new mayor to fulfill the remainder of disgraced ex-HNIC Kwame Kilpatrick.

Bing's defeat of interim mayor Ken Cockrel comes at a time when Detroit could do without more bad news. With the auto industry tanking in the state -- including the bankruptcy procedures currently being undertaken by Chrysler -- an unemployment rate of 22 percent, the highest home foreclosure rate in the nation and a football team that failed to win a single game last season, the city is pretty much playing fiscal Rihanna to an economic Chris Brown.

This means Bing will face a summer of idle young people due to budget cuts in city services, unemployed factory workers, overstretched police precincts, coffers $300 million in hock and a city council that is indecipherable from the cast of 'Claudine.'

This kind of thing always makes for long, hot summers, just like the one in 1967 when a police beat down in an after-hours joint sparked one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history. Now, it's wrong to flat out predict a riot, but the economic conditions are certainly rife for such an occurrence.

Bing is said to be bringing in teams of people from the business community to accelerate job creation in the absence of a manufacturing platform there. That's admirable, and if what he's talking about goes through, it would be unprecedented because there is a lot of opportunity for the business community to finally come in and execute free-market solutions to the problems there.

But job creation is just one part of the problem. There's also education in an underfunded, incompetent system with one of the highest dropout rates in the country, which has in the past snubbed attempts to bring accountability to the students, parents and teachers. The result is a call for more than 20 schools to be targeted for permanent padlocking.

Then Bing has to find a way to convince the people who are left to stay when the population has dwindled from about 2 million in the mid-1950s to 820,000 and dropping. Plus, eroding city services, environmental damage and crime rate which has become so out of control that the city couldn't even have a Cinco De Mayo celebration.

"So look, smart ass," you're probably thinking. "If you know so much, then what's the solution?"

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to be mean, but the D is my hometown, and Detroiters are my family. Believe me, they feel the same way about each other. However, the hard truth is family is the most difficult to look at critically. In many ways, as your family fares, so do you.

Most pundits have given up on Detroit, and, frankly, the only ones who haven't are Detroiters themselves. But that may well be the city's saving grace -- the resiliency of the natives. Both west and east siders are descendants of Southern plantations, Eastern European fields and Middle Eastern villages who headed to the city to stick out the hard times in hopes of a better day. To cut and run is just not in a Detroiter's programming.

There are no easy solutions to what ails Detroit. In large part, the city is caught up in an economic maelstrom that has overtaken the world and isn't coming to an end within the next year (no matter how much Ben Bernanke tries to pacify you). It really will take the citizenry to remember what it was like during the days of the Bad Boys, when the whole town seemed not only unified but crystallized.

Or maybe even those magic number days surrounding the 1984 World Series, when everybody wanted to be at Michigan and Trumbull to celebrate Kirk Gibson and Alan Trammell's victory.

What I'm saying here is that broad-based investment in community-based entrepreneurship and focused community-based markets could turn the city from a working-man's town to a think-on-your-feet hustler's town. Imagine avenues lined with firms and businesses of all types that kept money within the city limits and, to an extent, traded with the suburbs. The opportunity is there, if Bing could just make it so that Detroiters have to deal with minimal red tape and overregulation.

Detroit should be allowed to save itself, rather than believe that politicians can do anything for the city. It has been clear for the past 40 years that they can't.

Although he's seen his share of controversy in the mayoral campaign, Bing has also been a successful entrepreneur in his transition from NBA great to captain of industry. He'd do well to lead by example rather than lead from a podium (or, God forbid, a pulpit).

Perhaps, if the city invited the world in and exchanged ideas and ideals, Detroit would become richer for the experience. Motown has never been an island, and it has never been isolated. Right now is the worst possible time for isolationism and defeatism.