"The East Side of Lower Manhattan is pretty much going to be dead," predicted Stuart Rothenberg, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, whose firm is relocating from a number of locations in that area to a site across from the former World Trade Center. "That's a lot of space that's not going to get eaten up for a very long time."

Rothenberg said that the likelihood of former office space in the financial sector getting snatched up en masse by residential developers is unlikely. And his prognosis for the West Side of downtown isn't a whole lot rosier – he says developments there are "going to take longer" than projected.

On the retail end of the discussion, the audience was greeted by Lee Neibart, a senior partner of Apollo Real Estate, forecasting that Manhattan could see a lot of empty storefronts after a holiday season of wretched sales results. Another way that retail is getting killed, he observed, is because the chains' suppliers can't get sufficient credit to make their products.