Opinion: Trump’s 50-Year Mortgage Idea Isn’t Radical — It’s a Wake-Up Call

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Many in the press have enjoyed taking pot shots at President Donald Trump for his recent recommendation that the banking community make 50 year mortgages available to prospective homeowners.

As has become common in press coverage of President Trump, the focus is on a perceived attack on the President’s disconnectedness, when in fact his landslide electoral victories are more likely to indicate that he is better connected to the common man than are these elitist members of the press.

So let’s look at some context, and see what might be going on behind this proposal.

The typical mortgage length before the Great Depression was about fifteen years. Then for the next thirty or forty years, a twenty year mortgage period was more common, and finally, for these past fifty years or so, the thirty year mortgage period has been the norm.

This doesn’t mean others haven’t always been available; people with good credit but worse cash flow, or with worse credit but better cash flow, have always had a number of options to choose from when buying a home.

And there has never been a rule that you have to stick to the number in the mortgage anyway; just as lots of us pay off our cars before their term is up, many of us pay off our houses early as well.

So even if we do make the 50 year mortgage an available option, that doesn’t mandate that anyone has to take fifty years to pay off a house. The traditional advice to get out of debt as early as you possibly can will always apply.

The availability of yet another option is just another arrow in the purchaser’s quiver, that’s all. At a time when it’s harder and harder for most people, especially young people, to buy a home, we are talking about adding options to make it possible.

President Trump is a golfer, so let’s look at a game of golf. The typical golf bag contains fourteen different clubs, but hardly any player uses all 14 in one game; they are there to give the player as many choices as possible to win the game. Similarly, offering more loan options will hopefully bring home ownership into reach of more people, that’s all. It’s not a mandate that people must lock themselves into a 50 year debt; it’s just another option to make that move possible for more people. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But what the analysts should be doing is asking a completely different question: Why do we think we need to broaden the options for home ownership? Why isn’t the current array of loan choices sufficient to put every working American in a house?

That’s the question the press doesn’t want to touch, and that just might be the reason why they’ve attacked the 50 year proposal rather than engage in a dialogue about the motives behind it.

We have a growing crisis in home ownership in this country.

Fifty or sixty years ago, young people got married and bought a starter home – it was a small house with a small downpayment and a big but manageable debt, but it was still a house, and that young couple was building equity rather than throwing money away on rent like they did when they were single.

Thirty or forty years ago, young people started getting married later, and that starter home may have been a condo rather than a house, but it was still a start. The percentage of Americans who owned their own homes – the foundation of the American Dream, in fact – was still healthy.

In recent years, however, the bottom has fallen out of these statistics.

The average first-time homebuyer today is 38 years old, and climbing. Home ownership is rapidly becoming a senior citizen thing, not a growing family thing. And that is bad news, not just for our economy, but for our culture.

Home ownership is critical because it’s better than apartments for child raising, it gives citizens more of a sense of community, it provides a magnet to draw families into local charities, civic groups, community involvement, parishes and clubs. At a time when birthrates are below the replacement rate, the importance of having room to expand cannot be exaggerated; couples without room delay having children, while couples with room are more comfortable having the additional children our society needs.

There are many reasons why home ownership among the young is statistically down, each of which should be ringing alarm bells:

Salaries

Real income, on average, has been stagnant or dropping for decades. While this number is improving under the Trump economy, there hasn’t been enough of this improvement yet to solve this problem. The massive inflation in housing prices, car prices, food, energy and entertainment prices in recent years has not been approached by workers’ salaries. Every year that wages rise a little, costs rise more. This puts the biggest purchase – a house instead of a rented apartment – further and further out of reach.

Housing Stock

The importation of tens of millions of illegal immigrants over the past twenty years – nobody knows how big this number is, but it’s at least 30 million and probably more like 40 million now – has wreaked havoc with the market’s natural ability to adjust to housing needs.

Builders and investors can ensure that there are enough houses, condos, and apartments for legal, employed persons, with numbers appropriately adjusted for renters and buyers. But with local, state and federal government money funding the low-cost apartments of tens of millions of illegal aliens, this has forced citizens and legal immigrants into the more expensive apartments that remain, drastically pushing up the prices of houses available for purchase.

Add to this the entry of Chinese government money and other foreign investors, not to mention major Wall Street investors into the mix, and we now have hundreds of thousands of American houses being owned outright by either corporate or foreign absentee landlords, When houses are bought strictly for investment, they are sure to have high rents, leaving people for whom renting is the only option stuck between high-rent apartments and high-mortgage homes.

Property Taxes

Fortunately, this isn’t the case in every state, but in our nation’s worst blue states, the highest-population states, property taxes tend to be so high as to be a severe deterrent to prospective new homebuyers. If you’re spending as much on property tax as rent would be, it’s easy to understand people questioning the switch from renting to owning.

Growing government employee pension costs and welfare state entitlement growth have caused state and local budgetary challenges – in Illinois, California, New York, New Jersey, and too many others – that make growing property tax rates all but unavoidable for the years to come.

Careers

In the old days – a century ago, half a century ago, and even more recently than that, people would buy their first home, then move up as they advanced in their careers.

Perhaps a two bedroom ranch when the kids are little, then a four bedroom two-story when the kids are in their teens and college, then perhaps a nicer but smaller retirement home and a winter place down south when the kids are out of the house.

It takes career growth to accomplish that track. If you start on the assembly line, then move up to foreman or production manager, then move up to purchasing or engineering manager, then up again to upper management, all this growth is practical. One’s succession of family homes will follow one’s career advancement.

But what if the nation loses half its manufacturing in a generation? Then even if people have jobs to pay the bills, there aren’t the opportunities for advancement that pay for housing advances. We need more companies to house those departments; we need competition to drive employers to compete with each other for the best employees with better salaries, bonuses, and profit sharing.

It is the economic stagnation – the manufacturing stagnation – of the past couple of generations that has caused this downward pressure on what was long the traditional upward mobility of the residential market.

Solutions

In this context, the truth becomes clear: President Trump’s 50-year mortgage isn’t primarily a proposed solution, it’s a conversation-starter, a shock to the system forcing us to look at the big picture.

It’s an effort to wake up America to the reality that the American Dream has been growing more and more remote with every generation.

We need to bring back manufacturing, and stop driving businesses and their headquarters to foreign shores.

We need to expel the illegal alien welfare class that currently chews up millions of residences, crowding American citizens and legal immigrants out of affordable housing, and forcing good people into unaffordable options that just drive them deeper and deeper into economic hardship.

And we need to bring down the cost of living – as quickly as possible – because even apparently unrelated costs like cars, health insurance, and utilities combine to make the cost of a mortgage payment impossible for millions of deserving Americans.

It’s wonderful when we can propose a simple solution to a simple problem: pass this one law, or write this one regulation, or fund this one project, and the problem will be solved.

But that’s not reality for an issue like home ownership. This is a critical issue that’s impacted by most aspects of human life, and reciprocally, home ownership impacts the rest of those aspects right back.

Crime and big government, welfare states and sanctuary cities, the importation of goods we used to manufacture here, and an onerous tax burden, all combine to create this problem, and we must tackle all these issues and more to solve it.

The Trump agenda – cutting taxes and regulations, closing the borders and ejecting criminal illegals, using tariffs to reduce imports and increase domestic production, and so much more – is a coordinated effort to solve America’s many crises at once.

And it’s already making so much headway, but this just isn’t an arena of five and ten percent incremental changes. To bring back the American Dream, we need to support the Trump agenda’s continued progress, turbocharged.

And then we won’t need to worry about 50 year mortgages, because successful homeowners in a booming economy will be able to afford to pay off their 20 year mortgages ahead of time.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo