Community Well-Being and the Great Recession

The effects of the Great Recession on individuals and workers are well studied. Many reports document how and why individuals became more likely to be unemployed, to be in poverty, or to face foreclosure. But how have neighborhoods fared during the Great Recession? This brief poses neighborhood-level questions: To what extent have the impacts of the recession been spatially concentrated? Has this been a recession in which all communities have suffered roughly equally? Or has the pain been especially borne by some communities? In answering these questions, we pay particular attention to how communities that were disadvantaged before the recession fared during the recession, asking whether historically poor communities were especially hard hit.