Spying on your neighbors with ultra-high precision

We are entering the era of microarcsecond astrometric accuracy. Breaking the milliarcsecond barrier will lead to consequent leaps in astronomical understanding of diverse topics. Here we review some current ground-based trigonometric parallax efforts and their recent scientific results. We highlight the current status of nearby star research, including the RECONS census of stars within a 10 pc horizon, white dwarfs and cool subdwarfs, and the push to detect substellar objects via astrometry. We also provide details about recent improvements in the methodology that have permitted the determination of parallaxes with ~1 milliarcsecond accuracy, and what might be done to push routinely into the sub-millarcsecond regime.