31 Mike Duggan & Rick Snyder Mayor of Detroit, governor of Michigan DETROIT’S RESCUE SQUAD. Left: Snyder; right: Duggan/AP File

Last summer, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in the face of $18 billion in debt the Motor City could no longer pay off. For more than a decade, the crime-and blight-ridden metropolis has been drained of its residents and industries. It has one of the highest murder rates in the country, and its population has dropped from a peak of nearly 2 million to fewer than 700,000. But this year, two men are working beyond party lines—Mike Duggan, the Democrat who became the city’s mayor in January, and Rick Snyder, the Republican governor of Michigan—to raise the city from the ashes. Despite their different politics, the duo at least share a theory of the case that they can turn the city around—and they’re demonstrating a very un-Washington type of cooperation to get there.

For Snyder, 56, a former accountant and venture capitalist whose campaign slogan is “one tough nerd,” that means giving up wishful thinking and focusing on the bottom line. Snyder controversially backed the Chapter 9 filing for bankruptcy protection, which he said was a necessary “last resort” to stop Detroit’s downward spiral. He brought in an emergency manager and an advisory board to oversee the city’s finances, taking a cue from New York’s recovery after its 1970s fiscal crisis. But the governor, who insists Michigan’s health depends on Detroit’s, also agreed to funnel state money toward the city (despite losing the vote there in his 2010 election)—to the tune of $195 million, which, along with some $466 million in private money, is meant to offset pension rollbacks and keep the city’s finances afloat.

Meanwhile, Duggan, 56, a former health care CEO, is applying entrepreneurial ideas on the local level to attract people and businesses back to Detroit. He’s starting with its deteriorating North End. Instead of just demolishing homes as the city has in the past, he has offered financial incentives for purchasing, fixing up and inhabiting abandoned houses. To help Duggan achieve his goal of rebuilding the city’s population base, Snyder has also taken the unusual step of encouraging legal immigrants to move in through a program providing 50,000 “urban pioneer” visas for highly skilled and professional foreigners. (One conservative radio host called it “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.”)

Detroit has so far shown signs of incremental improvement: In the first six months of 2014, it decreased emergency response times by more than 30 percent, added 6,000 streetlights and established a home auction system, allowing people to bid for abandoned houses now owned by the city. There’s a long way to go, but Duggan and Snyder “have huge alignment,” the governor says, when it comes to getting the city’s numbers—finances and population—back on track as they set politics aside to do so. “We’re scorecard kind of guys,” as Snyder put it.