Two years of economic collapse have pockmarked the D.C. region’s affluent suburbs with blight, and experts are worried that the foundering cul-de-sacs and towns are on the verge of becoming the region’s next ghettos.

No IPTC Header found”What you’re looking at now is a structural problem,” Brookings Institution scholar Christopher Leinberger said. “We have structurally overbuilt the fringe … It ain’t coming back.”