This document is about housing in New Zealand. This report is an important building block that will help the Government make policy decisions. It assesses the key parts of our housing system; examining market renting, home-ownership, new housing, state, and social housing, housing assistance, homelessness, and emergency housing, security of tenure, and the social costs and benefits of housing quality. This stocktake report was commissioned by the Minister of Housing and Urban Development the Hon Phil Twyford in November 2017. Its main purpose is to provide the New Zealand public with a broad overview of the current state of housing markets and the housing system in New Zealand. This overview takes the form of a series of brief reviews of various housing outcomes and policy areas and backs these with extensive data and additional references. The brevity of this overview alongside the complexity of the topics it grapples with means that this stocktake is high-level and intentionally so. Such a perspective has allowed the authors to identify the key issues facing New Zealand in the housing and social policy spaces. However, although the project brief was to produce a report which is quite descriptive and avoids commenting on policy, this direction has proved difficult to follow completely.