NEW YORK (AP) _ Many Wall Street firms that moved employees to suburban locations have decided to keep their operations dispersed in places like Connecticut and central New Jersey to reduce their dependence on lower Manhattan.

But those decisions have come at a cost to the city.

For example, Morgan Stanley, the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, is renovating an office complex in White Plains to relocate 1,400 employees.

Real estate industry watchers said the exodus is likely to continue despite the hopes of city officials.

"There is a greater consensus that it is no longer ideal to have one campus, but is preferable to have a decentralized operation with two or three central nodes," M. Myers Mermel, chief executive of the real estate brokerage company TenantWise, told The New York Times in Sunday editions. "That decentralization of operations is a huge seminal event in the financial services industry that is going to have repercussions for decades."

The Security Industry Association has said that its members 20,000 of their 190,000 jobs in New York out of the city as a response to the Sept. 11 attack. Only half of those jobs returned.

"New York did lose employment as a result of 9/11, but after the first year, we started to see it stabilize," said the association's chief economist, Frank Fernandez. "The dispersion since then has had more to do with cost savings."