A Phil Hall Op-Ed: Over the weekend, President Trump posted a meme on Truth Social with the headline “Great American Presidents” that showed Franklin D. Roosevelt linked to “30-Year Mortgage” while Trump was next to him linked to “50-Year Mortgage.” Almost immediately after that posting, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, took to his personal X account to declare, “Thanks to President Trump, we are indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage – a complete game changer.”
Really? Is this the Trump-Pulte answer to restoring affordability to the housing market? Creating a 50-year mortgage with the goal of making housing more affordable is the equivalent of sending shipments of dinnerware into a famine-stricken region – it acknowledges that a serious problem exists but it offers the wrong answer without mitigating why the problem exists.
Taking out a 50-year mortgage will not help the average homebuyer save money. If anything, it will ultimately cost the buyer more by spreading out the loan terms for a much longer period – the lender profits from years of additional interest payments, not the borrower.
Furthermore, we’re still dealing with a mortgage rate environment that is stuck near the mid 6% level. Yes, borrowers can refinance their loans in a lower rate environment, but that’s assuming mortgage rates tick back to where they were in the pre-pandemic era. But even Fannie Mae – where Pulte self-appointed himself as chairman – doesn’t believe that’s going to happen anytime in the near future.
This 50-year mortgage shtick, sadly, is yet another attempt to distract people with bright shiny objects that ultimately fail to make housing more affordable. We’ve seen this is Pulte’s tiresome shilling of VantageScore, where he insists more people can become homeowners if FICO’s supremacy is challenged. But credit scoring was never the root of the affordability problem and VantageScore’s looser scoring structure runs the risk of repeating the 2008 debacle of flooding the market with unqualified buyers.
There was also Trump’s attempt to shame homebuilders into constructing more residences, with his appointment of Pulte to influence the industry. Have you seen any fruits of that labor? Pulte is still on X posting that builders need to start building on their empty lots, utterly ignoring the fact that they are not building due to elevated costs of building supplies (a situation exacerbated by Trump’s whim-driven tariff policies), a labor shortage, and localities with onerous zoning regulations that the administration has been unwilling or unable to dislodge.
Let’s be frank – housing prices have continued to rise in the Trump-Pulte era to historic highs. Whenever the FHFA puts out data on year-over-year housing price hikes, Pulte refuses to call attention to his agency’s findings because it contradicts his insistence that he’s working to make housing more affordable. It is another evasion from someone who refuses to talk about fixing loan-level price adjustments and insists he is fighting mortgage fraud while shutting down questions about the alleged mortgage fraud committed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally.
Instead, Pulte wastes everyone’s time by polluting X with ridiculous statements such as “Illegal Immigration under Biden severely hurt the Housing Market and the ability for young people to buy homes. This is not talked about enough!!!” Yes, it is not being talk about because illegals were not responsible for keeping Gen Z out of the housing market. And Biden has been out of Washington since January – we’re in the Trump economy now and young people are not able to buy homes.
Oddly, the most damning argument against the 50-year mortgage came from Trump himself, who posted another meme on Truth Social that claimed the costs of buying a new home dropped significantly from Biden-era July 2024 to Trump-era 2025. Thus, we have to ask: Why do we need a 50-year mortgage to reanimate housing affordability if Trump policies are bringing down housing costs?
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo: Tweetyspics / Pixabay
Pulte continues to strike me as a guy who just throws stuff out there and see what sticks. I seriously doubt any serious consideration is being give to a 50 mortgage. There is no fixing the housing industry’s biggest problem…affordability. Affordability is a national problem but can only be dealt with at a local level. It’s not rates that will fix it or magic mortgages. Affordability has been and will continue to be a problem in every market around the United States at some level that is uniqlue to that market. Nothing magic will change that.
This article and naysayers are missing three very important points when they claim this just elevates debt and is bad:
1) Adults take out mortgages, not children or people that are incapable of making decisions for themselves. This is simply another option to choose from. No one is eliminating any other mortgage product, this is not cancelling the 15 or 30 year mortgage.
2) If reduced principal reduction is so bad why do we have interest only loans? Why aren’t those outlawed! Renters get nothing – not principal reduction or upside from appreciation.
3) 100% of your rent will never come back to you! If a 50 year mortgage gets you into a market you were priced out of you are in the game, your monthly payment means something, and while your debt burden is longer and principal reduction less than a 30 year mortgage you are getting three very important things: appreciation, some principal reduction, and stability (landlord cannot move you at the end of your lease, payment stays the same albeit small increases for taxes and insurance, and the general uplift that comes with accomplishing home ownership! Communities with a higher percentage of homeownership are more stable and less transient!
Thank you Nathan!
I agree with you Nathan!!!
I appreciate your viewpoint. I think to 50 year mortgage will help, but i would not recommend it for everyone. Yes, there is more than high prices and interest rates restring the RE market. I don’t know what Washington can do about local issues, except misunderstand them.
I think introducing a new loan product, of a 50 year mortgage, would push house prices higher, since more people will qualify for the same number of houses, increasing demand.
The average mortgage that most homeowners keep is 7 years. They sell or refinance in most cases in 7 years.