In what iStar is calling a pivotal moment, the company will soon seek public approval for its plans to build a 16-story luxury hotel and condominium on an Ocean Avenue foundation where two previous developers failed.

“We believe in Asbury Park’s potential,” iStar’s chairman, Jay Sugarman, said. “I want it to be a cool, creative community where there’s always something going on, where there are always interesting people to run into. To be able to do that in a beachfront environment is the best of both worlds.”

Asbury Park’s revival has more to do with demographic trends and a generational desire to live in more urban areas than a master plan hatched in the 1980s that largely failed to take off. Gay men and lesbians have gravitated to Asbury as a less expensive alternative to Fire Island and the Hamptons. Rail service also makes it easily accessible from New York City and northern New Jersey, and the city has a solid core of downtown commercial buildings ripe for development.

“All these factors came together,” said James W. Hughes, dean of the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “Great buildings downtown. The gay community was in there very early because they didn’t care about the school system. Now you have millennials suffering fatigue from being raised in the suburbs. The shore still has magic.”

Though they have been disappointed before, there is a palpable sense among elected officials, New York transplants, entrepreneurs and many residents that Asbury’s moment has arrived.

“This is really an exciting time to be here,” said Yvonne Clayton, a retired AT&T executive who moved back to her hometown in 2011 from Manhattan for the first time since 1967.