NEW YORK CITY-At “the New Downtown Conference” this morning, business and real estate leaders reflected on Lower Manhattan’s past, present and future. The conference opened with a panel discussion--“Business Pioneers of Downtown”--moderated by Elizabeth Berger, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York.

“A major attraction--and I think this is increasingly important for tenant relocation--is that you can live here,” Berger said in remarks before the panel discussion. “As I said before, 56,000 people do. That’s more than double the number on 9/11 and it’s more than five times the number who lived here when I first moved here in 1982.”

Berger described those residents as “affluent” and “well educated” and drawn to the area due to its proximity to their workplaces. “Thirty percent of them walk to work and 41 percent of them work right here in Lower Manhattan,” she said. The convenience of mass transit was another bonus residents seek--one that panelists cited as key to the revitalization of Lower Manhattan.

Alan Scott, managing director and head of CRES Americas at Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc., underlined the importance of transportation to their recruitment efforts. He said that the recruitment advantage that a downtown location has for Deutsche--located at 60 Wall St.--is that it allows recent grads and new recruits to easily commute in from more affordable areas. “The real advantage for downtown is the ability to have affordable housing in close connectivity to where our offices are,” Scott said.

Steve Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage at CB Richard Ellis, touted the green specifications to which the new World Trade Center buildings are being built, and hinted at the types of companies that might be interested in the new class A spaces coming available.

“Those tenants are anywhere from law firms to financial services firms to other media firms to Conde Nast,” Siegel said, adding that CBRE is representing a number of cosmetic firms and publishing firms looking at the area for office space.

Another area of real estate--and one that some panelists found lacking--was the restaurant sector. “The issue that I see standing in the way is, oddly enough, something that is perhaps beyond anyone’s control and that is the continued weakness of the retail and dining scene downtown,” Steve Cuozzo, a commercial real estate columnist, restaurant critic and managing editor at the New York Post, said. “There’s a continuing weakness at the heart of Lower Manhattan.” Restaurant owners, Cuozzo says, insist that the numbers just aren’t there to support opening locations in Lower Manhattan. Help on that front may be on the way, however, from restaurateur Danny Meyer, who plans to open several eateries in Battery Park City.