Sean Sweeney, Director of the SoHo Alliance

Soho's unrelenting development will continue unabated, as more retail stores move into formerly backwater areas that have relatively more affordable rents, namely lower and eastern Soho around Canal, Howard, Lafayette and Centre streets.

However, residents will continue their fight to stop unbridled commercialization, particularly in opposing a proposal by mega real-estate developers to establish an unnecessary and unwelcome Business Improvement District (BID) on Broadway from Canal to Houston streets. The developers' BID proposal met with dogged resistance in 2011 from Soho's residents, businesses and property owners, as well as the community board, two local newspaper editorial boards and elected officials. The prediction is that it will die in 2012. R.I.P.

Soho's traffic problems and failing transportation infrastructure will be addressed, like the crumbling crosswalks along the length of Greene and Mercer streets and the potholes that have never been repaired in well over a century on Wooster and Crosby streets.

Clueless tourists will continue to block the sidewalks in 2012.