“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.”