Despite being home to Wall Street and some of the city’s priciest real estate, Lower Manhattan limps along behind neighborhoods such as Morningside Heights, downtown Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens, when it comes to job growth.

Since 1997, four of the five city ZIP codes with the largest employment losses were in Lower Manhattan, according to a report published by the Center for an Urban Future yesterday.

The director of the Center for an Urban Future, Jonathan Bowles, said it is a neighborhood “that experienced tragic attacks on the World Trade Center and there were huge losses. Companies moved their offices to new places and signed long-term leases and lot of them won’t come back.”

The report analyzed job growth stretching back 10 years from 2007 in the 40 ZIP codes that make up New York City.

The president of the Downtown Alliance, Elizabeth Berger, said Lower Manhattan lost 13 million square feet of office space after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and she questioned the methodology of the study.

Ms. Berger said signs of the area’s recovery include the diversification of businesses in Lower Manhattan and the emergence of Silicon Alley, the transformation into a far more residential area than it was 10 years ago, and the skyrocketing costs of real estate.

“It just doesn’t make sense. What we really have is an unbelievable success story,” she said.

A spokesman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., Michael Murphy, said that part of the reason for the slower job growth, in addition to the terrorist attacks, might be because the neighborhood “is changing from a strictly financial district to a mixed-used neighborhood.”

It wasn’t all bad news for Lower Manhattan: The ZIP code 10004, which represents the bottom tip of Manhattan and parts of Battery Park City, added 17,231 jobs.

Lower Manhattan is also in the throes of a construction boom. In addition to the five towers and memorial being constructed at the World Trade Center site, there is a wave of residential buildings coming to the area, including Larry Silverstein’s new tower at 99 Church St., Forest City Ratner’s Beekman Tower at 8 Spruce St., designed by Frank Gehry, and a 57-story luxury condo being built at 56 Leonard St., designed by the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron.

Highlights from for other parts of Manhattan and the other four boroughs: Downtown Brooklyn saw a 253% increase in job growth, Morningside Heights an 187% increase, Astoria a 56% increase, and Harlem’s 10030 and 10026 ZIP codes saw increases of 106% and 99%, respectively.