NEW YORK CITY-Despite steady employment growth and solid commercial real estate activity in 2011, the majority of GlobeSt.com readers are still on the fence about what 2012 holds in-store for leasing, sales and development. Results from last week’s GlobeSt.com’s Quick Poll show that 56% think the economy will show little or no improvement in 2012, while 13% say it will “suck worse than 2011.” At the same time, 31% claim the market will lay flat until the third quarter--and then soar.

Kenneth McCarthy, senior economist and senior managing director of research at Cushman & Wakefield, tells GlobeSt.com that many of these concerns are stemming from the Eurozone crisis and domestic policy issues in the United States. “A lot of times people take the recent past and project it into the future,” he says, noting that the second-half slowdown from S&P’s downgrade and debt problems overseas still weigh heavy on people’s minds. “Europe is still very much unclear about how that’s going to be resolved. We’ll have a period when everything looks like it is starting to get resolved, markets will get better and people will be more optimistic, and then you may have another crisis occur. People get a little gunshy about that.”

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Peter Hennessey, president of the New York Tri-State region at Cassidy Turley, tells GlobeSt.com that the malaise in the business community relates more to Washington than to Europe. “There’s so much uncertainty and a consistent amount of gridlock since the last election, really,” he says. “People have low expectations about a lot of things getting accomplished. There’s uncertainty in terms of job growth, and fundamentally, the growth of the economy.”