It's being built in other cities! NYC has a lot of demand from rich people from around the world who want a place in New York. Us regular types have to make do with a patchwork of rent-controlled, public, market rate, and subsidized units that fall somewhere in between. It's a supply and demand problem where the supply is constrained by do-gooders who don't seem to realize that the perfect can be the enemy of the good. Manhattan will always have a high cost of land so it'll never be truly affordable but we could in some dream world once again build Potemkin Mitchell-Lama villages...but those aren't coming given the mood in Washington. The nimbys who SAY they want affordable housing are really working to doom it. They work to stop building anything which lowers supply and do nothing to reduce NYC's insanely high cost of labor (exacerbated by union rules) that makes building anything but luxury condos prohibitive.