In the vast majority of countries access to affordable land and housing is a critical contemporary challenge. While in different countries and regions the specificities of the challenge vary, the universal truism is that it is becoming increasing difficult for the vast majority of urban residents to obtain and retain adequate and affordable land and housing. T he first four volumes in the Adequate Housing Series canvas the state of affordable land and housing in four regions facing major affordability difficulties: Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and Europe and North America (member countries of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe). Each volume firstly explores the major trends in housing conditions, availability, quality and tenure modalities. Following this, each volume analyses housing policy responses to address growing affordability problems and the improvement of substandard housing conditions. Lastly, key recommendations for local, national and international policy initiatives that can increase the provision of affordable housing in the respective regions is provided. T he Latin American and Caribbean region is a unique landscape for the consideration of housing and land issues, owing in part to the contrasts and disparities that characterize this region of over half a billion inhabitants.1 It is a region exhibiting rapid levels of industrialization, but where the great majority of the population works in the informal sector. It is a place where wealth is concentrated and gross domestic products (GDPs) are rising, but large segments of the populations live in relative or extreme poverty. It is a geography where political and cultural history is strongly rooted in its rural heartlands, but exhibits the highest rates of urbanization in the developing world. Whereas urban areas in Latin America were once conceived as refuges from extreme poverty and shelter deprivation relative to rural areas, greater numbers of the poor now live in cities than rural areas, and urban areas in the Caribbean have higher proportions of poverty than rural areas.