I think its back to the urban/suburban thing in that there are a lot of people wanting the urban lifestyle and thus urban apartments/condos, as in "I can step outside and be within easy, pedestrian friendly, enjoyable, walking distance, of lots of stuff".
Thats whats hard to find a good selection of.
If your going to live the urban lifestyle and that often includes smaller spaces, you will want the trade off of having the ("sidewalks be your hallways, the downstairs or around the corner coffee shop be your "breakfast nook", the PAC, museums, concert venues, festivals, and nearby theaters be your "home theater/entertainment system",the parks be your yard, the sidewalk cafe's your patio, the local pub or hang out your den, the corner grocer your pantry, your "feet, bike, bus, etc." be your transportation, etc. etc.). Our downtown is getting there with lots of new amenities (I am looking forward to the new downtown museums), hopefully an uptick in more businesses, still could definitely use more shopping and a movie theater, but yes, we still need more living right in the core to push things forward.
I think we are actually making decent progress on all fronts. I am glad we are seeing the housing we are seeing for it very well could have been that we saw the new arena come in and a bunch of clubs and restaurants opening,,, and didn't see the housing. Its slow progress but I think the next couple of years will see our downtown fleshed out enough that it can finally begin to pass as a small, but well rounded, urban enclave. Our city offers pleeenty of great suburban lifestyle/housing options, but its about time our city became a real city that can offer some great urban lifestyle/housing options as well.
In many other cities, even small to medium sized ones like Tulsa or OKC, you can to go several different, new, urban neighborhood, areas and look through multiple different apartment/condo buildings. Here you can go to multiple suburban neighborhoods in several different suburban areas and find new, inexpensive to expensive options in each area. Here, for urban living, there is a building here, a building there, a remodel here, a new one there, definitely more options than you had before, but still very skimpy shopping compared to a lot of other places and housing type options, and not really enough even in one area to have that "urban neighborhood" feel. Even OKC is much further ahead than we are in that respect. Though having said that I kind of like how Tulsa is developing such that a lot of our downtown urban housing is very much mixed in with and intertwined within the rest of the fabric of downtown. There isn't a huge chunk of living in one area thats isolated from everything else, which you could say that a lot of OKCs new housing is. But as we begin to infill more and have more mixed use buildings (like this Fairfield Inn) I think we will actually create a more "NYC on a tiny tiny scale lol" type experience. We may actually end up being better quality than our friends down the pike, but perfection takes time
