November 11, 2025 12:44 PM UTC

Trump's Housing Affordability Solution? A Mortgage You Will Never Pay Off

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• by: Colorado Pols

Denver7’s Dan Grossman reports on a new proposal from the Trump administration that they claim is intended to alleviate the nationwide housing affordability crisis in which our state is unfortunately a leading indicator.

But the solution Trump is proposing sounds like heartbreaking news for everyone except mortgage lenders:

The Trump administration is working on a plan to create a 50-year mortgage to incentivize buyers to jump into a historically slow housing market.

The plan was confirmed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency over the weekend, calling the 50-year plan a “game-changer,” as it could lower monthly mortgage payments by hundreds of dollars for buyers who say affordability is increasingly out of reach.

The most obvious problem with this “game changer” idea is that it would convert many homebuyers into lifetime renters in all but name, with a mortgage that for many buyers will last longer than their natural lifetimes. But the real problem could be that by fractionally increasing the purchasing leverage without increasing the supply of housing, this plan will just drive prices up:

Denver7 spoke with Realtor.com Chief Economist Joel Berner to get a better idea of how the plan could upend the mortgage market.

“Anytime we subsidize buyers, we give people who are looking for homes more buying power, and don’t increase the supply of homes for sale, we run the risk of driving home prices up pretty considerably,” Berner said. “So, if this does what it says it will do, and get lots of people off the sidelines and into buying homes, then we can expect home prices to rise and a lot of those savings to evaporate just because of the higher home prices.”

Finally, paying interest for 20 years longer on a mortgage, assuming you live to pay it off, means hundreds of thousands more in interest on the same principal–again, a great deal for lenders, not so much for prospective buyers. Yes, buyers slowly can build equity and won’t be evicted on a whim, but this scheme is mostly meant to make people feel like they own a home while lashing them even more tightly to mortgages that in most cases will never become deeds.

What Americans need is homes with a purchase price they can actually afford, not a new financing gimmick while prices rise farther out of reach.

But for all their promises, this is not an administration that thinks out of Trump’s very tiny and very dated box.