Measuring to transform new information tools to address the housing deficit in Latin America and the Caribbean

Housing and urban development rank among the most pressing challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean. Despite progress toward more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable cities, the region continues to face significant gaps in housing quality, access to financing, basic services, and resilience to climate change. Compounding these challenges is a critical obstacle: the lack of reliable, comparable, and easily accessible information to support decision-making. For years, data on housing and urban development has been fragmented. Indicators that are not comparable across countries, statistics scattered across multiple sources, and the high time costs required to build robust diagnostics have constrained the ability of governments, financial institutions, academia, and the private sector to design evidence-based public policies. To foster dialogue and collaboration among key stakeholders by presenting a regional data platform and an updated, comprehensive methodology for measuring the housing deficit in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the aim of strengthening evidence-based housing and urban development policies that are more effective, inclusive, and responsive to structural gaps in the sector.