Realtors and economists predict that the World Trade Center attack will result in a short-term blow to the local economy, but say that, over time, the city will likely come out OK.

"In the short term, obviously, there's a large amount of devastation and loss of life. It's a huge blow for New York," said Columbia University economics Professor David Weinstein.

But Weinstein, who has studied what happens when cities suffer catastrophes such as bombings during wartime, said that historically, "the long-run impact is actually quite modest.. . . In the short run, there will be a run-up in commercial real-estate prices in the scramble to find office space, and some businesses are going to have to move out. But with federal help and city help, there's going to be a rebuilding."

Mark Thompson, managing director of Plymouth Partners, a commercial Realtor, says many companies will relocate into space recently made vacant by the dot-com bust. And in the long term, he predicts, there will be new construction to help create needed offices.

But he acknowledges that some of New York's most prestigious addresses might be less desirable from now on than an anonymous building in downtown Brooklyn or Queens. "There may be some issues some companies will have, [such] as being in landmark buildings they see as potential targets," he said. "But I don't see people fleeing New York."

Marcia Van Wagner, chief economist for the Citizen's Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group, agrees that there will likely be a short-term turndown, accelerated by the national economic slump already in progress when Tuesday's attack on the Twin Towers occurred.

"A year from now, if your co-op or condo is worth less, it will probably be worth about the same that it would have been without this," she said.

"It's not part of a structural erosion of what makes the city competitive. That's not to say this doesn't present a fiscal challenge. There are a lot of very big taxpayers involved in this, and if a number of them leave the city, that's not good for the city's fiscal base."

The attack destroyed office space for hundreds of firms and thousands of jobs, not just in the Twin Towers but also in surrounding buildings that are now off-limits due to structural damage. Small businesses that provided ancillary services to some of the firms directly hit - everything from delis to copy shops - will experience reduced revenues from fewer customers.

On the other hand, billions of dollars in federal aid are in the pipeline. Insurance payments will help damaged companies reconstitute. New jobs will be created in construction.

Largely due to the airline slowdown, tourists have largely disappeared from normally bustling places like Times Square. Cabs are suddenly available in neighborhoods where they used to be impossible to find. And discount tickets are available to Broadway shows that had been hard to see.

Van Wagner says that an immediate tourist slowdown was to be expected, explaining, "When things like this happen, people get superstitious about the place where the tragedy occurred."

Barbara Corcoran, who is probably the best-known high-end Realtor in Manhattan, predicts that prices will soften in the short term, but largely because of a wait-and-see attitude that she expects will rule the real-estate market for the next few months. AP