Middletown is in trouble. Homes and business have been lost. Good paying jobs have gone away as well as the people who worked them. Unemployment has hit double digits and many folks have lost confidence in our city’s ability to deal with this crisis.

Ours is not unlike many other communities caught up in the extraordinary paradigm shift in the structure of the traditional workplace. New solutions must be found to recover and prosper in this “re-set” of our national economy. What was then is not now and will never be again.

In general, when it comes to jobs, our community is looked upon as a dirty industrial town. The unfortunate perception is that there are too many low-skilled people living in the area for anything more than a labor-intensive business to locate here.

Although better schools and smoother streets may be important to improving Middletown’s prospects for renewal, we may never return to the boomtown of employment our city once enjoyed. Regrettably, too few of our high school graduates who leave for higher education ever return to find hometown jobs that match their qualifications.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “between 1980 and 2000, the population of metropolitan areas where less than 10 percent of adults had college degrees in 1980, grew on average by 13 percent. Among metropolitan areas where more than 25 percent of adults had college degrees, the average population growth rate was 45 percent.”

Unemployment today, as in previous recessions, is strongly linked to our nation’s manufacturing sector which appears to slowly be moving overseas. Aside from climate, a city’s skill mix can be one of the most important factors of its success. This has been an advantage to the cities that have done well over the past few decades and a curse to those cities with less skilled workers which have suffered urban decline.

Many cities that bounce back do so by working in harmony with smart entrepreneurs to discover new or unique ways to redefine themselves. If others can do it, why can’t we? In a world where perception is everything and everything is perception, the last thing we need is for Middletown to be defined as that “sink hole” on Interstate 75.

For too long, Middletown was an island unto itself where all the jobs necessary for prosperity could be found at home. When the inevitable tide of urban expansion from our neighbors to the north and south began, little was done to engage that wave of change. Outsiders be damned. We were a company town and 25 years later we’re still paying for the short-sighted sins of our city fathers.

As our name implies, we are a “town in the middle” which finds itself smack-dab in the center of one of the fastest growing regions of Ohio. Considering the location, it’s hard to understand why we’ve not had more success in capturing our share of that prosperity.

Unfortunately, due to the restrictions of our city borders and lacking any shovel-ready industrial sites with infrastructure in place, Middletown doesn’t seem to hold many cards in the game of regional politics and commercial real estate development. However, a city is not unlike any other consumer product. People choose to invest because they believe it offers good value for their money.

Let us not forget that Middletown is still a place that offers good value based upon its quality of health care, parks and recreation, performing and fine arts, senior services and affordable homes. It’s a great place to live, regardless of whether you work here or not.

When our city’s new economic development folks are out there doing their best to bring new employers to our city, why can’t they also campaign to bring new residents to Middletown solely based upon our community’s great location and quality of life? One is not required to work in a city in order to enjoy living there.

When my family moved here 20 years ago, it was about living in a city with a great number of residential resources that Middletown still enjoys today. I worked in Dayton and my wife in Cincinnati. My commute was less an hour and hers was more. Today, those same jobs are located just down the road in West Chester Twp. and Springboro. Living in one place and working in another was common then and is more so today.

Why not make one ingredient in the recipe for Middletown’s renewal about recruiting future residents who work elsewhere but do so within a practical distance to and from our city? Aren’t some of the key reasons where people choose to call home based upon the location of their job, the quality of the community and the value of their time? Why shouldn’t we make more of an effort to recruit those who commute? I would think our city could benefit from a new generation of blue- or white-color workers.

As for me, I will always believe that how and where I live is more important than where I work.

Merrell Wood is chairman of the Middletown Park Board and the founder of Middletown Habitat for Humanity, TV Middletown and the Sink Or Swim pool campaign.