While few will be able to escape the resulting hardships of the current economic downturn, America’s most economically vulnerable communities — those where household finances were already unstable and work scarce — will be hit hardest by the recession currently underway. The Economic Innovation Group recently began a research initiative called the Neighborhood Poverty Project which tracks changes in the number and composition of metropolitan high-poverty neighborhoods from 1980 to 2018 with the primary goal of substantiating the idea that returning to the pre-crisis “normal” of national growth is not enough to lift America’s highest-poverty neighborhoods. The project finds that the number of neighborhoods in which 30 percent or more of the population lives in poverty doubled from 1980 to 2010.