The Globe has finally written the obituary for all those fanciful plans to pack the Greenway with a bevy of new museums and cultural institutions.

The article was prompted by the YMCA of Greater Boston’s announcement it is canning plans to build a new downtown Y over highway ramps abutting this strip of downtown parkland.

It’s the last of a series of ambitious - and frankly pie in the sky projects - that stretches all the way back to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s ill-fated, $100 million Garden Under Glass.

While each of these projects had a different spin, all shared one thing in common: Huge costs and general inability to raise money.

Sorry, but these ridiculous Greenway plans should have been called out on the carpet years ago as the Big Dig was ending and old Central Artery was being dismantled.

Yes, even a decade ago it was becoming pretty clear that the idea that nonprofits like Mass Hort were going to pay for major development projects, one petunia sale at a time, was downright foolish.

I know, since I busy back in the early 2000s raising questions about Mass Hort’s efforts to keep its claim alive to a prime piece of the new Greenway next to South Station. (I was a business reporter at the Boston Herald at the time.) Others were as well – check out this devastating piece in 2003 by one of the Globe’s top editorial writers.

Back when Matt Amorello nearly ran the Turnpike into the ground in the early 2000s, the highway authority commissioned an expensive master planning process for the Greenway, complete with all sorts of fanciful drawings on what was supposed to go there.

Of course, Amorello and gang had no appetite for serious questions about how all this was going to get paid for. They did get a lot of free publicity, though, letting Matt play the role of big shot urban planner.

Of course, this was exactly the time that our local political, business and media leaders should have been taking a hard look at this Greenway fantasy, one in which cash-starved nonprofits pay for extravagant monuments to their backers, one bake sale at a time.

That didn’t happen and the Greenway fraud was allowed to live another decade.

Shame on all of us for that.

For home buyers, it looks like the gravy train is finally over.

The idea of actually putting down a substantial down payment has come to seem like a quaint notion, a throwback to a time when every suburban family had a station wagon parked in the driveway.

I bought my house Natick back in 2002 with 3 percent down – and I hardly was unusual.

Well that’s about to change – and big time.

The Obama Administration is out today with its long promised overhaul of the nation’s beleaguered mortgage finance system.

There’s a lot of hot air about giving the boot to federally controlled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Of course, the Obama folks are letting Congress decide how to do that.

Wow, now there’s a prescription for quick action.

But tucked into the overhaul plan is a proposal to rework what the standard mortgage will look like.

And one key tenet of the proposal – which the feds can put into action without congressional approval – involves raising the minimum down payment to 20 percent.

Bankers and federal regulators have spent months hammering out the outlines of the so-called Qualified Residential Mortgage.

In fact, Wells Fargo had wanted to push it to 30 percent, but apparently did not win out. Obviously, that would have been good for the big banks but bad for smaller banks and mortgage companies.

Anyway, 20 percent down is nothing to sneeze at. It would certainly thrust the mortgage market back to an earlier era - the 1980s if not all the way back to the 70s.

And it’s coupled with another big change that would really hit the jumbo mortgage market hard, especially in the pricey Boston area.

Starting this fall, Fannie and Freddie won’t be able to buy mortgages larger than $625,500 – down from $730,000 currently.

That might sound like a lot of money out in Oklahoma, but not around here, where, if you are lucky, it will get you a fixer-upper in Newton.

Office and commercial properties posted a nearly 20 percent price increase in 2010, the MIT Center for Real Estate recently reported.

It’s one of a growing number of signs the recovery in the commercial real estate market is starting to pick up crucial momentum.

A top Fed official also recently gave the commercial sector a clean bill of health, noting that the biggest banks no longer face major threats from office tower loans gone bad.

Meanwhile, Jones Lang LaSalle is predicting a 40 percent jump in office tower and commercial property sales in 2011, to $135 billion.

All rather remarkable given the gloom that pervaded just a year ago. Remember all those dire predictions of a coming tidal wave of office tower foreclosures?

We did get a few big foreclosures, like the Hancock, but lenders managed to work out less sensational deals with other tower owners behind closed doors.

Now contrast all this to the messed up residential market, with home prices slumping fast towards a double dip.

With the residential sector on a prolonged bender, I guess it’s up to the office market now to generate the good news and keep Wall Street happy.

Maybe it’s time to embrace a new image for 128.

OK, the old signs that touted 128 as “America’s Technology Highway” are long gone.

But the image of the Boston area’s most prominent roadway as packed with high-flying tech companies is deeply etched the region’s collective conscious.

Yes, those high-fliers are still there – witness French software firm Dassault Systèmes’ deal to take down 325,000 square feet in new space alongside 128 in Waltham.

However, amid the general economic carnage of the last two years, a very momentous shift has also quietly taken place.

The life sciences industry has become the largest occupier of office and lab space along central/western 128, stretching from Dedham to Burlington.

High tech now comes in second.

Biotech and life sciences firms occupy nearly 17 percent of the Rt. 128 West corridor, compared to under 14 percent for tech firms, according to Boston-based commercial real estate firm Richards Barry Joyce & Partners.