The 50-Year Mortgage: Completely Fine or a Total Flop?
Mortgage experts are divided on the wisdom of a 50-year mortgage. No one seems to think it's the key to making homeownership affordable.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
This week's newsletter takes a look at the Trump administration's proposal to create a 50-year mortgage product to rival the 30-year mortgage that became standard during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration. Mortgage analysts are split on whether this is a benign, even beneficial, idea or a complete catastrophe.
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
Also covered this week is the surefire catastrophe that is the proposed D.C. ballot initiative that would freeze rents and tighten the city's inclusionary zoning requirements.
Last but not least, we cover a new lawsuit from a California developer whose apartment project was singled out for exclusion from the state's streamlining of its environmental review laws.
The Pros and Cons of a 50-Year Mortgage
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump issued a Truth Social post appearing to promise that he would one-up FDR by creating the 50-year mortgage.
In short order, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte issued his own X post saying that the administration was in fact working on creating a 50-year mortgage, which would be "a complete game changer."
Thanks to President Trump, we are indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage—a complete game changer. https://t.co/HZDPzO0qJG
— Pulte (@pulte) November 8, 2025
Currently, the standard mortgage—the type that government-supported enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy from lenders and then sell to investors—has a 30-year term.
What the Trump administration appears to be saying is that they want to change federal rules and regulations to allow Fannie and Freddie to also purchase 50-year mortgages.
The idea is proving divisive, even within the White House. Politico reported on Monday that the 50-year mortgage was Pulte's sole initiative and is receiving a lot of backlash.
The FHFA chief reportedly showed up to the Oval Office with a poster comparing FDR's 30-year mortgage to a Trump 50-year mortgage, and Trump posted an image of the poster a few minutes later.
Internally, White House officials are accusing Pulte of selling Trump "a bill of goods," per Politico. The White House is reportedly being inundated with angry phone calls from critics of the 50-year mortgage.
The advantage of a 50-year mortgage would be lower monthly payments for borrowers. Lower monthly payments would mean more people might be able to afford a mortgage.
The disadvantage would be that borrowers would end up paying more interest over the life of a 50-year mortgage. They'd also build equity more slowly.
The wisdom of this tradeoff, and its economy-wide consequences, have proven divisive among mortgage experts.
RedFin chief economist Daryl Fairweather highlighted a few of the downsides in a lengthy X post. Interest costs could end up being twice as high on a 50-year mortgage. By building equity more slowly, homeowners would have a harder time financing a move by selling their house. Increasing the pool of potential homebuyers would also increase home prices, she says.
President Trump is considering a new 50-year mortgage product to address housing affordability. As Redfin's chief economist, it's my job to look at the data and the trade-offs of such a proposal.
On the surface, the 50-year loan aims to lower monthly payments, potentially helping… pic.twitter.com/0JmmN9LSJO— Daryl Fairweather, PhD | Chief Economist (@FairweatherPhD) November 10, 2025
Kevin Erdmann, a Mercatus Center–affiliated scholar who writes about mortgage and housing policy on his Substack, is more sanguine.
"If [a 50-year mortgage] is an option that works for somebody, there's no reason to not make it available," he says.
Erdmann is also skeptical of the idea that the availability of a 50-year mortgage would increase home prices much. He notes that home prices stayed essentially flat in recent years, even as mortgage rates (and therefore monthly payments) jumped from 3 percent to 7 percent.
If prices didn't fall as monthly payments spiked, one shouldn't expect them to rise as monthly payments fall. "The monthly payment isn't a very powerful factor moving [home prices]," he says.
Despite the debate about whether this is a worthwhile financial product, there does seem to be a consensus that a 50-year mortgage would not make homeownership more affordable, generally. Enabling more home construction through supply-side reforms is what's necessary to bring home prices down.
Whether a 50-year mortgage ends up happening is a big open question. In order to make this standard product, the federal government would have to change regulations to allow Fannie and Freddie to purchase 50-year mortgages, which they're currently prohibited from doing.
There's some debate about whether this would require congressional action or if the administration could do it unilaterally.
Trump himself seemed ambivalent about the idea during a Monday Fox News appearance, saying that "it's not like a big factor. It might help a little bit."
Feeling Singled Out
Earlier this year, the California Legislature passed a sweeping reform to the state's environmental review law intended to speed up the approval of apartment projects. Except for one apartment project, that is.
Late last month, Santa Barbara developer The Mission LLC sued the state of California and the City of Santa Barbara on the grounds that one of its projects had been unconstitutionally singled out for exclusion from regulatory relief being generally offered to urban apartment projects.
Assembly Bill (A.B.) 130, passed as part of this year's budget package, exempts apartment projects being built within incorporated cities and urbanized county land from the environmental study requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
CEQA-mandated studies can run hundreds of pages, even for something as simple as an apartment building or new subdivision, and take years to complete. Third parties can stretch things out longer by suing over allegedly insufficient CEQA studies.
The law has proven a major roadblock to new home construction and thus a target of the state's YIMBY (yes in my backyard) reformers, who uniformly cheered the passage of A.B. 130.
Not so happy is The Mission. That's because of a second trailer bill folded into the budget package, S.B. 158, which deprives projects of a CEQA exemption if they're being built in cities of between 85,000 and 95,000 people, in counties of between 440,000 and 455,000, and if they're being built next to a historic landmark, and if part of the project parcel abuts wetlands or creeks.
The only project in California that would appear to meet that definition is The Mission's proposed 270-unit project, which would be built next to Santa Barbara's historic mission building.
The Mission's project has been hotly controversial ever since it was first proposed in January 2024. City politicians have called it a "horrendous nightmare" and a "monstrosity."
The author of S.B. 158 is Sen. Monique Limón (D–Santa Barbara), the incoming Senate President Pro Tem, whose district includes the city of Santa Barbara.
The Mission's lawsuit argues that by passing a law that applies to just one project, the Legislature violated the U.S. and California constitutions' equal protection guarantees.
A general trend in California housing law in recent years has been to shift some land use decisions up to the state level in order to deprive localities of discretionary powers to modify or deny some types of housing projects.
It would be a real shame if the Legislature developed a habit of carving out exceptions for individual projects itself instead.
A D.C. Rent Freeze?
Activists in Washington, D.C., are proposing a ballot initiative that would impose an immediate two-year rent freeze, if passed, and freeze rents during times of high inflation after that.
The ballot initiative, which is being sponsored by the group More Affordable D.C., would also lower the income limits and rents that could be charged on affordable housing units.
"Housing costs have risen faster than wages in D.C. for years. Our rent freeze gives immediate relief to over 200,000 renters who are struggling to stay in place," said Salim Adofo, the proposer of the ballot initiative, in a Monday press release.
D.C. already has a rent control law that caps rent increases in multifamily buildings built before 1975.
The current law, like many rent stabilization policies, allows landlords to raise rents by two percent plus the rate of inflation. The idea behind it is simply that if inflation is going up, so are landlords' costs of operating their buildings.
The More Affordable D.C. proposal would completely invert this relationship by freezing rents when inflation gets above 6 percent.
The initiative would also tighten the District's inclusionary zoning requirements. Right now, new developments in the city typically must include below–market rate units that are affordable to people making between 50 percent and 80 percent of the median family income.
The More Affordable D.C. proposal would cut the income limits on IZ units to 45 percent of the median family income. It would also require more IZ units to be family-sized two- and three-bedroom units.
Taken together, these provisions would represent a significant tightening of D.C.'s rent control and IZ policies. Deepening affordability requirements on new developments and applying floating rent controls to all units would almost certainly discourage new housing construction.
That would be a huge step back for a city that actually managed to build a fair amount of housing in recent years and has kept rental prices somewhat in check as a result.
Quick Links
- In the U.K., the NIMBYs are using AI tools to file planning complaints. In some ways, the future looks a lot like the past.
NEW important article from @AishaKDown and @Robert_Booth: could the new AI-powered Objector service slow delivery of homes still further? https://t.co/uRsVLgSkwn pic.twitter.com/yY2hsrHhQ7
— YIMBY Alliance (@yimbyalliance) November 9, 2025
- Saudi Arabia's completely ludicrous The Line project, a proposed linear 100-mile-long city to be built in the middle of the desert, is being dramatically scaled back after running into financial and practical hurdles, according to a new Financial Times investigation.
- The housing questions on New York City's ballot all passed last week. You can read my coverage of the vote here.
- Someone has created a pretty cool map of the top 10 most densely populated two-mile blocks in each U.S. city. The quick fall in population densities as one goes down the list is pretty remarkable.
Amazing piece of geography trivia in map form. This graphic ranks the 10 most densely populated 2-square-mile, 4-sided polygons in US cities. Fun to look at. Source: https://t.co/2rsH6EpnXo pic.twitter.com/JdkujTfnOp
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) November 7, 2025
- The Los Angeles City Council considers tightening the city's rent stabilization law.
- New York's real estate industry attempts to ingratiate itself with the city's new socialist mayor.
