Greenbaum nostalgic for the heady days of six months ago.

David Greenbaum of Mendik/Vornado invited the professionals at May 8's Young Men/Women in Real Estate luncheon to close their eyes.

"Spend a minute dreaming," he said. "Think back to the best time in your career... When was it? I bet it was last year. Last year, in fact, was as good as it can get. I told everyone at our office Christmas party that my only regret was 2000 had to end."

For every aspect of the industry, he added, 2000 will be remembered as the salad days.

"For those in ownership, like us, rents were moving up a dollar a week. In construction, your biggest worry was finding the labor for all the work you had. And leasing velocity was remarkable."

But in a market where rents jump at those rates, he said, it became hard to please his notoriously demanding boss. That happens when the market moves faster than the lawyers.

"Steve Roth would say to me 'Why are we so low? Why are we renting space at 10% below the market?'

"Of course we were above the market when we found the tenants; but the time it took to sign the deal, the market would leave us behind."

This phenomenon took some getting used to, and it didn't occur overnight, Greenbaum stressed.

"Five years ago, we were looking to take Mendik public," he recalled. "We were featured at a forum and the topic was 'Are CBD [Central Business Districts] Dead?' Then last month Bruce Mosler over at Cushman asked me to sit in on a panel discussion and the topic was 'Breaking Space Barriers.'"

In those five years, the demand for Manhattan office space went into hyperspace, and the market offered nowhere for the demand to go. This sloth-like inventory growth has created the healthiest real/state market in the nation, and he brought his numbers to illustrate why.

"In the 1990's we added seven million SF of space to the city, but we lost five million to residential conversions. In other words, we've added 2% to the inventory. Over that same period, Washington D.C.'s inventory increased 5% and northern went, up 17%;, Boston went up 8.5% and San Francisco went up 19%.

"Meanwhile, our net absorption since 1993 is 60 million SF, more than the entire stock of space in both San Francisco and Boston."

Small wonder.

"There are 1.1 million students in New York City schools -- which doesn't include you rich people [in the audience] who send your kids to private school -- while the entire population of Boston is only 550,000. To take it a step further, in the 1990's private sector jobs in the city increased 500,000 while in the boom of the 1960's the increase was only 300,000."

Which brought Greenbaum back to the present.

"This recession is probably the first that is not real estate-led," he said, "Because our markets remain healthy. And they're healthy due to their transparency. Problems rise when we don't have transparency. Donald Trump once borrowed a billion dollars on his name alone without having to show anyone his financial records. That wouldn't happen today. In the financial sector, there was Long Term Capital. In that case, [John] Merriwether convinced the market that they knew more than everybody else."

The result of that game of Liar's Poker was a $50 billion' crash that necessitated a bailout by three countries' central banks.

"If only the banks had talked first."

The healthy market Greenbaum de scribed would continue, he promised, if the next mayor was willing to invest in its future.

"We've learned that telemarketing doesn't work," he said. "We need to protect and promote our CBDs, for it is the clustering of New York that makes us great. We are denser in jobs per mile than any other city in the world, but we must, ensure that people can get to, from and around the city. The next administration must concentrate on our long-term infrastructure. The last major improvement to the city's infrastructure was in 1964 with the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge."

So be concerned, he said, but know that the industry will endure.

"They say 'The absence of worry is worrisome.' It's good that everyone here is a little worried."