Critics slam door on Trump’s 50-year mortgage proposal

President Trump’s proposal to allow homebuyers to take out 50-year mortgages is getting trashed by finance and business experts and has left Mr. Trump’s Republican allies fuming that he was rushed into promoting it.

Mr. Trump, who hyped half-century house payments on Truth Social, downplayed the proposal after just two days as some of his biggest supporters called it the worst idea of his presidency.

“I don’t like 50-year mortgages as the solution to the housing affordability crisis,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said.

The Georgia Republican said the idea would leave homebuyers “in debt for life,” by requiring them to shell out far more money to pay for their homes than a typical 30-year mortgage, which would primarily reward the banks, mortgage lenders and home builders.

Influential conservative podcaster Matt Walsh, who normally champions Mr. Trump’s initiatives, told his 3.3 million podcast subscribers the president’s mortgage proposal “is the worst idea he has ever had.”

Mr. Trump’s inner circle of advisers is reportedly unhappy about the president’s sudden endorsement of the idea and believes he was imprudently steered into backing it by Bill Pulte, his Federal Housing Finance Agency director.

Mr. Pulte, whose family founded the residential construction giant PulteGroup, raved about the plan Saturday night.

“Thanks to President Trump, we are indeed working on the 50-year mortgage — a complete game changer,” Mr. Pulte posted on social media.

In an earlier post, Mr. Trump pitched the 50-year mortgage on social media with an image of him next to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, during his tenure, paved the way for the 30-year mortgage currently used by 90% of homeowners.

The side-by-side image of the two presidents and their mortgage plans came from Mr. Pulte, who printed it onto a poster board and gave it to the president at his Palm Beach, Florida, golf course on Saturday, according to reports.

Mr. Pulte did not immediately respond to a request for a comment about the plan.

As soon as Mr. Trump posted the idea to social media Saturday afternoon, it sparked fast and furious backlash by just about everyone with a calculator: Homebuyers who take out a $400,000 loan on the 50-year plan would write a smaller check each month. But buyers would pay off the loan over an additional two decades, which would add $378,000 in interest payments compared to a standard 30-year loan.

“That’s not home ownership — that’s renting,” Glenn Beck said during his Blaze TV program. “It’s almost like, ‘You will own nothing and be happy.’”

On Sunday, Mr. Pulte sought to calm his critics. He told his 3 million followers on X that the 50-year mortgage “is simply a potential weapon in a WIDE arsenal of solutions that we are developing right now.”

Mr. Pulte said his agency is “very close to a deal” to revise the nation’s credit scoring system to include rent payments, which would enable more people to qualify for home loans. He’s also evaluating assumable mortgages, which would allow certain buyers to escape higher interest rates by taking over a seller’s loan.  

Some experts are at least partially defending the idea of a half-century of home loan payments as a way to increase home ownership.

Susan M. Wachter, a real estate professor at the Wharton School’s Penn Institute for Urban Research, said a plan to allow 50-year mortgages could benefit a narrow group of buyers who otherwise might not be able to afford a loan in high-priced areas where employment opportunities are robust.

“For the renter who wishes to remain in an area where they have a job and they have a future that they are building and want to protect themselves against rent increases, what’s the option?” Ms. Wachter said. “A 50-year, basically interest-only mortgage is generally risky, but is it riskier than renting?”

According to the Eli Residential Group, apartment rent in the D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia has increased in the past five years by nearly 30%.

Targeting a narrower group of homebuyers, Ms. Wachter said, would also keep the growth in demand from surging too much and driving up prices, which is another problem associated with a longer loan repayment option.

“A small, targeted program with attention to the supply side is worth considering,” she said.

Mr. Trump shrugged off the negative response to the 50-year mortgage proposal in a Fox News interview Monday night. He said the biggest problem in the housing market is interest rates, which climbed under President Biden thanks to massive government spending that caused soaring inflation.

“All it means is you pay less per month,” Mr. Trump said, defending the mortgage idea. “You pay it over a longer period of time. It’s not like a big factor. It might help a little bit, but the problem was that Biden did this. He increased the interest rates.”