Party at ground zero

I've been reading up a bit about buying real estate in NYC. Despite the unbelievably high median price (~750K) of apartments, there are quite a many studios in lower Manhattan that are selling below 300k. Now that my wife will be working there for the foreseeable future, owning a small apartment doesn't seem terribly out of line. We still have to do a bit of research. Maintenance costs for some of these apartments are phenomenal ($700+ for a 250 square foot studio?!?), and apparently many of these co-op apartments require 20 percent down. Another thing is, what differentiates a co-op from a condo? I have some experience with cooperative living (I lived with a friend in the Greenbelt Co-op), but I'm not certain what the drawbacks are. Well, I suppose a big drawback would be the fact that I probably couldn't rent out my co-op, or treat it as an investment property.

Anyway, I'm not sure how realistic it is right now. We don't have an abundance of cash, though I could conceivably refinance my current mortgage to prepare for buying in the future. Ugh, we'll see.

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Life goes on and on, and the grand experiment of a long distance marriage commences.