Ensuring universal access to affordable land and housing requires urgent global attention. While in different countries and regions the specificities of the challenge vary, the central issue remains: housing that is adequate and affordable is increasingly out of reach for a large proportion of the population in the vast majority of countries. This volume provides an overview of the state of affordable land and housing in the region of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), referred to in this publication as ‘Europe and North America’. This region is principally defined and united by geography: as the name suggests, it includes Western and Eastern European countries. It is also, in many ways, united socio-politically: it includes Western Europe’s traditional North American associates Canada and the United States of America (US).Compared with the regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Europe and North America presents distinctive challenges for affordable land and housing. As this volume highlights, housing affordability is an issue in all countries, not only in ‘developing countries’ of the global south but also European and North American countries. This volume therefore focuses on housing conditions and policy responses to major housing challenges in the 56 European and North American countries of the UNECE (Figure 2). Given the immense diversity of housing responses the emphasis is on practices that are conducive to the provision of affordable land and housing. The volume has three principal objectives. Firstly, it explores major regional trends in housing conditions with an emphasis on availability, quality and tenure choice of housing in different housing systems. Secondly, it analyses housing policy responses to address major challenges such as growing affordability problems, access to social housing and improvement of substandard housing conditions. Particular emphasis is given to the urban dimension of affordability in the context of economic, social and political change. Thirdly, the volume provides some recommendations for local, national and international policy initiatives that could contribute to the provision of affordable housing.