Image conscious: Hickory hopes a new bond package will repair its reputation as one of the nation's most-depressed metros.

• Position: OUR TOWNS

If it were a high-school kid, Hickory would get stuffed into lockers a lot. Lately, the media and pollsters have been bullying the state's eighth-largest metro area, with Mayor Rudy Wright especially peeved by a poll of most miserable places to live. "I believe they had us 25 spaces below Detroit. So, yeah, we're not happy with that, and we recognize we've got to tell a better story."

Hickory became an easy target after its textile and manufacturing jobs headed to Asia in the 1990s. City officials hoped fiber optics was the future, but job cuts by Coming, N.Y.-based Coming Inc., which has a plant there, and other companies proved otherwise. Many former mill towns are struggling, but none more than his, Wright insists. "We're like no other place in this state. Look at the numbers." Over the last two decades, Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton lost nearly 15,000 jobs. Rocky Mount, down about 8,000, is the only other metro to record shrinking employment. (However, it lost about 11% of its 1994 jobs, compared with 9% for Hickory.)

Instead of cowering, the metro is seeking solutions, says Scott Millar, president of Catawba County Economic Development Corp. Those include four commercial sites in Catawba that opened last...