“Renaissance.” So reads the massive billboard confronting those traveling east to Middletown, Ohio, via I-75. It’s an advertisement for Renaissance Pointe, a $200 million new construction development that broke ground in June. The fifty-acre project promises to summon a host of retail shops, restaurants, hotels, and a three-thousand-seat, multipurpose arena to Middletown over the next decade.
Down the road in the downtown historic district, N.E.W. Ales Brewing, a women-owned brewery, slings craft beer within walking distance of Sorg Opera House, a nineteenth-century performing arts center reopened in 2017.
This portrait might surprise those whose source knowledge of Middletown is GOP vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance. His 2016 coming-of-age-memoir-turned-Netflix biopic, Hillbilly Elegy, described his hometown as “little more than a relic of American industrial glory” — a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.”
As Donald Trump’s right-hand man, Vance delivers campaign speeches suggesting that Bidenomics is exacerbating the decline of Middletown and Middle America broadly, and that the only solution is to return a billionaire businessman to the White House.
Yet after decades of population decline, the Ohio of the 2020s is growing again, with Columbus — the capital city ninety miles east of Middletown — ranked as the fastest-growing city in the nation. The population of the Cincinnati metro area has been ticking upward as well. Two small Ohio towns even landed on last year’s Zillow’s top-ten “most popular markets” list.
It’s true that empty buildings and shuttered businesses still dot Middletown’s downtown, and to call the corporate-campus-to-be on the city’s outskirts a “renaissance” is undoubtedly PR…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Ryan Zickgraf
