It's true translation can be a bit tricky sometimes... What Yoshida means by "apartments" and what we think could be pretty different. All we really know for sure is there's going to be large buildings containing instanced "homes" for individual players.

As for Ishgard housing, Yoshida said at E3 that they couldn't commit to that right away, so maybe they had to push the idea back for now. Considering how flawed the housing system is right now, they could stand to fix some of the issues before they add more. After all, they've seen that adding housing wards didn't fix the housing problem at all in the current housing areas on some of the most populated servers. The last thing they'd want is to add more new content that only a select few will be able to access. It'd create more outrage, etc.

That, and they really need to get on upgrading the servers, so the less they plan beforehand, the sooner they'll get to that on their massive list.