The COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in substantial changes to American neighborhoods in ways that were only beginning to be elucidated. There had been an excess of permanent business closures, particularly among small neighborhood businesses most vulnerable to social distancing, such as local barber shops and nail salons. COVID-19 outbreaks in late September 2021 had caused 2,000 neighborhood schools to close for an average of six days in 39 states.

A burgeoning body of research had tried to understand the forces driving these trends, focusing on infectious disease transmission at the individual level or economic models at the business level. What had not been considered was the context in which these changes had taken place. By context, it had meant the neighborhood community environment that held the opportunities, restrictions, risks, and flexibility for post-pandemic growth, including job opportunities in business sectors robust to social distancing; comprehensive broadband internet access to facilitate telemedicine, online schooling, remote work, and online grocery shopping; parks and walkable streets to facilitate socially distanced physical activity and social interaction to mitigate social isolation brought on by the pandemic; and the provision of medical care through the availability of alternate health care providers and pharmacies.

Access to these neighborhood resources had not been equally distributed across America, reinforcing risk for vulnerable populations, including older adults, children and adolescents, racial/ethnic minorities, and those in rural areas.

However, a lack of national, standardized, longitudinal metrics of the local neighborhood environment had hindered the ability to identify which communities were most vulnerable to the immediate and longer-term consequences of the pandemic for a host of behavioral, psychological, social, and economic outcomes. To address this limitation in the nation's data infrastructure, data from the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) had been augmented, curated, and disseminated. This archive included a wealth of physical, social, and economic characteristics of local neighborhoods across the United States (e.g., racial segregation, business density, environmental hazards, broadband internet access, and healthcare availability) in the years both before and since the pandemic.