Truthfully I am not in love with those streetscapes that you guys keep posting. OKC could certainly use more landscaping and beautification but I don't get the attraction to those pictures at all.

We've developed our suburbs too far out. There are no reasons to invest in existing suburbs because a new one will be built, with a little bit bigger houses, in whatever the current architectural fashion happens to be, another 2 miles further out and it will be cheaper. My sister and her husband bought a house in a brand new neighborhood about 8 years ago. They bought one of the first houses completed. They have since moved out even further. A lady I work with lives in that same neighborhood and she talks about how it's going downhill and she wants to move out. You're talking about $175K homes that were built in like 2005 and people are already leaving the neighborhood.

We aren't providing a reason for people to stay in their old neighborhoods. There's no reason to invest in them.

What OKC needs to do is: 1) stop spreading out further, 2) build a good urban core, and 3) start beautifying the existing city. You're never going to make OKC a beautiful place if most tomorrow's money goes to places that are today's empty farmland. We should have Deep Deuce-level density all the way down to the river and then out to the fairgrounds. It should go all the way up Lincoln (except for existing historic neighborhoods), and all the way out to MLK down Reno. We need several decades of growing up, not out.