The potential for what affordable housing could look like in New York is now just a field that spans nearly a square block in East Harlem.

But before the end of the year, ground will break on this city-owned land between 111th and 112th streets and Park and Madison avenues, making way for Sendero Verde, a $350 million mixed-use project that will deliver 655 units of affordable housing aimed at low- to middle-income residents. The three-building complex, designed by Handel Architects, will house a YMCA, a charter school, a grocery store, a health center, and a pizzeria. Community gardens and a central plaza designed by AECOM will fill the inner courtyard.

Sendero Verde brings the city’s vision of a robust housing program into focus. The plan, now called Housing New York 2.0, promises to preserve or build 300,000 units of affordable housing by 2026, at a cost of $83 billion. Despite this impressive goal, the most ambitious in the country, New York faces serious hurdles to meet its housing needs and keep the city livable for everyone from the poorest residents up to the middle class.

Roughly 77,000 New Yorkers are homeless, many of them families with children, according to a report from HUD. The city’s portfolio of public housing is aging and the stock of city-owned land is dwindling. At the same time, middle-class New Yorkers are migrating to outlying neighborhoods in search of cheaper rent, putting pressure on communities once considered immune from gentrification. Short-term rental services like Airbnb have cut into the housing supply, as tenants and landlords cash in on a hungry real-estate market. But, unlike other cities facing a relatively recent crisis, in New York, housing has always been a scarce resource.

“At every period, people have felt constrained by the physical barriers of the city. We’ve always built higher, built deeper, built denser. It’s why housing issues are so urgent here,” says Benjamin Dulchin, the executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, an advocacy group. “In some ways, since the founding of the city, we’ve expressed our class struggles through the struggle over space.”

New York City is the nation’s biggest public-housing landlord, with 400,000 tenants living in 325 developments controlled by the city’s housing authority, NYCHA. But the intense housing needs here reach back into history. The state enacted its first rent-regulation laws in 1920, in response to housing shortages and spiraling rents in the city. After World War II, a mix of private and public investment led to the rise of vast, subsidized middle-class housing developments like Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan and Co-op City in the Bronx. And in the 1980s, under Mayor Ed Koch, the city began investing billions of dollars of its own capital to turn abandoned properties into affordable housing units as a way to overcome blight. Although Koch’s plan was controversial at the time, it has since become doctrine.

Today, New York faces a different kind of housing crisis. The decline of the 1980s has been replaced with a boom. The population is growing and expected to reach 9 million by 2030. The city is constantly building, with roughly 25,000 new units constructed each year, transforming the skyline into one peppered with cranes and the sidewalks a maze of scaffolding and sheds.

Yet the demand for housing seems insatiable. As land values soar, landlords are pushing out longtime rent-stabilized tenants to make room for those able to pay more. Such evictions can lead to homelessness, putting more pressure on an overburdened shelter system. As New Yorkers move deeper into the outer boroughs looking for housing, neighborhoods that were once havens for the poor have become hot rental markets. A StreetEasy report found that although rents rose 31 percent citywide between 2010 and 2018, the spike was far greater in poorer neighborhoods. For example, the report found that rent in Midtown Manhattan remained relatively stable during that time, rising 16 percent, while in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, a Brooklyn neighborhood 45 minutes from Midtown, rent soared by 45 percent. All this comes at a time of growing economic inequality, with wages stagnating for many New Yorkers.