OK, so with a mayoral race in full swing, there’s more than enough hot air to go around.

But in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, mayoral challenger Michael Flaherty offers a pretty good run-down on big development projects that have gone nowhere during the Menino years.

So here’s Flaherty’s list of Boston’s many bridges to nowhere.

While he mixes in a few debatable jabs at the mayor, the list itself is fairly accurate.

Anyway, read Flaherty’s list and judge for yourself. I’ve added my own comments in the interest of fairness.

* Kensington Place—Menino demolished the historic Gaiety Theatre to make way for a tower—except five years later, all that exists now is a hole in the ground. (Note from SVV:  OK, the mayor didn’t literally tear down the theater himself, though his development authority pushed through this boondoggle.)

*    Frank McCourt’s parcels in South Boston—now John Hynes’ parking lots—because of their grand ideas and big personalities, the Mayor refuses to do business with them and therefore one guy was forced out of the city, the other has a project that is going nowhere.(Note from SVV: Neither developer has been on the mayor’s favorites list, but I am not sure you can blame Frank McCourt leaving town to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers on the mayor.)

“* Hayward Place—after the Mayor awarded the parcel to his friend, the Chinatown property remains a parking lot. (Note from SVV: The “friend’ in question is the developer of the Ritz Carlton towers, which won favor at City Hall for driving a stake through the old Combat Zone. But yes, years after the Hayward Place parking lot was slated to be developed- and bring new tax revenue into the city - it remains a surface lot.)

* Columbus Center—after years of community meetings, fighting and lack of leadership from City Hall, the city has an abandoned construction site.

* South Station tower—years in planning, nothing to show for it.

*  Former New Balance Headquarters—personality conflicts with the Mayor, so the property lays fallow.(Note from SVV: Not sure what personality conflicts he is alluding to, but again, no project here.)

* 2 Financial—the Mayor cost the project six years from his indecision—I was the only person to show up and support the development at numerous community meetings. (Note from SVV: Not sure about Flaherty’s role as unsung hero, but project was debated to death.)

*  D Street—With little leadership from City Hall, the developer and community were left to fight over the details of the proposal and again, after years of debate, the property is still vacant.”

I am a big fan of small banks.

Community banks often pick up the slack, taking on the loans and customers that the big banks feel they are too busy or important to handle.

But can our local banks really fill the lending void that has opened up as our region’s biggest banks struggle to repair badly wounded balance sheets?

It’s a question I pose in my column this week for B&T.

Surprisingly, one of the skeptics on this question is none other than an executive at one of the South Shore’s leading local banks, Rockland Trust.

Gerry Nadeau, a senior lender at the bank, said the struggles the financial giants are facing have opened up unprecedented opportunities for small and mid-sized players.

Nonetheless, he’s nervous about the prospects for our local economy when the region’s three largest banks, Citizens, Sovereign and Bank of America, are scrambling to shore up their balance sheets with additional capital.

While community banks can do a lot, they simply don’t have the capacity to provide the massive amount of credit needed to lift the Boston area out of the economic doldrums.

It’s certainly an unusual - and brave – view for a banker to take.

Others are concerned not only about the health of the big banks in our region, but the fact that we no longer have any major banks headquartered here.

With major projects like the redevelopment of the Filene’s complex sitting stalled, there’s no big bank with a vested interest in the city to lead the charge.

I’m hoping for the best, but it’s hard to see a recovery taking shape without at least some healthier big banks.

There have been few better investments in the past few years than real estate in some of the Bay State’s most exclusive suburbs and resorts.

After all, even as the rest of the country saw prices decline amid the worst downturn since the Great Depression, real estate values in tony towns like Wellesley and Weston and Newton and on Nantucket, the getaway spot for the nation’s corporate elite, just kept rising.

But, as I noted in my column for B&T this week, the downturn appears to be finally reaching even the elite communities, with median price declines in all three communities mentioned above, among others.

That means median sale prices falling below a million in some cases for the first time in years.
Still, some big questions remain. Is this the last act before the market hits bottom, the grand finale of sorts of the downturn?

Or are these price declines the start of a wrenching devaluation, one that could make it possible again to buy a decent home in Wellesley, say for $500,000 or $600,000?

Does it still make sense to shell out a million or more to buy a ranch in Weston or a Cape in Wellesley? Or were those prices crazy to begin with?

What’s your take?

Man, now this is bad.

Just when you thought it was safe to go to the bank again, another tidal wave of bad loans appears headed straight for the nation’s still fragile financial system.

A Wall Street Journal survey finds that 900 small to midsized lenders could be grappling with $100 billion in commercial real estate loan losses by year’s end.

And total losses could reach $200 billion, based on worst case scenarios.

The Journal, in its analysis, used an approach based on the recent “stress tests’’ given to the nation’s largest 19 banks by the feds.

Among other alarming findings:

*Losses on commercial real estate are expected to be double the $49 billion mid-sized and small banks are likely to lose on home loans.

* More than 600 banks would see capital fall to levels considered problematic by federal regulators.

*And losses from commercial real estate loans could actually exceed revenue coming in at more than 900 banks.

Here’s a pretty big story that so far is not getting much traction.

Harvard University President Drew Faust is announcing a year-long moratorium on further land purchases in Allston, the Harvard Crimson reports.

It comes on the heels of another Harvard land deal, a long-term lease with an option to buy for another industrial tract near the university’s giant new science complex it is building in Allston.

It is part of a general pattern that has been taking shape since Faust took office of a more cautious, go-slow approach to Harvard’s steady expansion across the river into Boston.

Harvard is an economic powerhouse for the area, so let’s hope the slowdown is temporary and not the start of a major shift in its plans.

Still, a little transparency, as Faust is now offering, can’t hurt either. I always found it amazing how Harvard has steadily bought up vast tracts of Allston with little or no scrutiny. Maybe more galling, the university never seemed to believe it had any responsibility to do much more than offer as bare acknowledgement of its land dealings, and then typically after it was caught with its hands in the real estate cookie jar.

In a letter to Mayor Menino announcing the moratorium, Faust also indicated Harvard will focus more attention leasing up and improving the already extensive collection of Allston retail and industrial properties it already owns.

That, obviously, is also a good thing - and a breath of fresh air given past practices.

I recently took on the Patrick Administration’s budding drive to turn Massachusetts into a green paradise.

A mountain of new regulations aimed at forcing businesses to do everything from reengineer parking lots to buy expensive solar power could add billions in costs to already beleaguered businesses, I argued in my weekly B&T column.

So with the real estate market reeling, what better time to heap thousands in additional costs on the construction of new homes?

The Boston Herald reports the state’s Board of Building Regulations and Standards has given the green light - so to speak - to tough new energy codes that could increase the cost of constructing new homes and office buildings by as much as $10,000 per structure.

It’s welcome news I am sure to already hard-pressed local home builders, struggling with the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

“Does anyone look out the window? There’s a recession going on, and we’re adding to the cost of doing business here,” David Begelfer, president of NAIOP Massachusetts, told the Herald.

Well, apparently not.

Here’s a pretty disturbing piece of news.

The fall-off in commercial property prices has already reached the lows it hit during the nasty downtown of the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to an index put out by the MIT Center for Real Estate.

And the office sector, compared to the residential market, is just getting rolling - downhill that is.

Overall, prices of commercial properties sold by major institutional investors fell by nearly 6 percent in the first quarter. It’s the fourth consecutive quarterly drop for the MIT commercial property index, placing it 26 percent below its peak, which came back in mid 2007.

That compares to the 27 percent drop the index experienced during the early 1990s downturn.
The question now is how much worse can it get –  though, with a wave of foreclosures of office towers and buildings now breaking, yes, things could get a lot worse.

“It’s possible that the first quarter of 2009 was the nadir in market sentiment,” said Professor David Geltner, director of research at the MIT Center for Real Estate. “Sales volume is down almost to nothing, as reflected in our demand index.

I guess it’s not just developers who are dejected about the commercial real estate market.

A national survey of chief financial officers and senior comptrollers find 93 percent expect office building and other commercial property values will decline this year. (It sure would be interesting to find out what the 7 percent who believe office tower prices are going to start rising again were drinking.)

Anyway, there could be a silver lining here for some companies if declining real estate values were actually to lower some corporate tax bills, but not so fast.

The Grant Thornton International survey finds that 63 percent of the corporate finance executives polled also complain their real estate tax bills have gone up, not down, over the past three years.

That hardly sounds like a good combination, though it likely sounds familiar to many homeowners.

The execs were also pretty glum, for what it’s worth, about the state of the economy as well.

Four out of five of the CFOs believe the economy will stay stuck in recession through the end of the year, while a full three quarters believe the economy will get worse over the next several months, the survey finds.

Well that is absolutely confidence inspiring.

I recently caught on with Jan Jones, the top government affairs exec at Harrah’s Entertainment.

Harrah’s, one of the largest casino companies in the world, happens to be headed by a former Harvard business school professor, Gary Loveman. No Las Vegas exile, he actually lives in the suburbs.

Jones, a former mayor of Las Vegas, has her own connections here as well.

Not surprisingly, Harrah’s has long had its eye on the Massachusetts market in hopes state lawmakers would finally legalize casino gambling here, Jones indicated.

Those chances have increased dramatically over the past couple months of a triumvirate of expanded gambling backers at the summit of state government. New House Speaker Robert DeLeo has made it clear he is interested giving slot machines a whirl, as did Senate President Therese Murray in a recent speech to Hub business leaders. For his part, Gov, Deval Patrick has been an enthusiastic backer of casino resorts.

After talking with Jones the other day, it’s pretty clear Harrah’s still has its eye on Massachusetts.

But the casino giant is also moving cautiously after having been hit hard by one of the worst downturns in generations.

In fact, the scuttlebutt in the industry is that some behind the scenes lobbying by Harrah’s and other major casino players is one reason the governor and the new House leader are putting a gambling vote off until the fall.

The big casino companies want to play here, but they need time to repair their balance sheets. Others, including some private investors interested in becoming big casino players, are said to favor legislative action now, not later.

Jones did not directly address this scuttlebutt one way or another when I ran it by her, but she did have this to say.

“Getting it passed right now, who is going to have the capital?’’ she asked.

Still, Jones gave a thumbs up to Gov. Deval Patrick’s expressed preference for resort style casino development over stripped down, no frills slot halls.

And she suggested a sliding scale for taxing any new casino development. Rates could start off high, and then go down as a casino company begins to pump money into building a larger casino resort.

“We are cautiously watching Massachusetts,’’ Jones said.

Even real estate rock stars like Boston Properties’ Ed Linde and Mortimer Zuckerman are having trouble borrowing money these days.

The Wall Street Journal provides an interesting look at the fairly tough terms BP had to agree to in order to land a $215 million construction loan to build its planned, Russia Wharf tower.

A group of five banks, led by Bank of New York Mellon, set some pretty stringent terms.

For example, the loan covers just 40 percent of the project’s total price tag, now at $550 million. That has forced Boston Properties to dig into its corporate coffers to bridge the gap.

In fact, the real estate giant had thought, just a few months ago, that it would have been able to borrow $320 million. That’s a good $105 million more than its current loan and over half the cost of the project.

No dice, apparently.

That compares to construction loans back during the boom, which would have covered 80 percent of the project’s cost, not the miserly 40 percent BP was able to wring for its lenders.

All this, of course, is on a project that has a major, and pretty rock solid, anchor tenant, Wellington Management, on the hook for 450,000 square feet.

And that’s before you get the recourse provisions, which puts Boston Properties on the hook if the new project can’t generate enough cash to service the debt.