President Donald Trump’s proposed solution to the housing affordability crisis — offering homebuyers a 50-year mortgage option — is, in some ways, the quintessential Trump administration policy.
First, a profound lack of thought went into it: Trump reportedly greenlit the proposal after just a 10-minute chat at his golf club with Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte. Second, the policy announcement was more reactive than anything else. It was clearly born out of a panicked reaction to the 2025 election, when Democrats’ focus on affordability helped them sweep several races. And third, this idea, supposedly intended to address housing affordability, doesn’t actually do anything about affordability at all.
Letting homebuyers opt for a 50-year mortgage over a 30-year mortgage won’t make any homes cheaper. Instead of bringing down home prices themselves, Trump’s plan is to simply give people more options for taking on debt. And homebuyers who opt for the 50-year loan will take on considerably more debt. In exchange for slightly lower monthly payments, they will end up paying a lot more in interest over the duration of the loan — because the interest will accrue over a longer period and because, as the usually pro-Trump Wall Street Journal editorial board observed last week, lenders will probably set higher interest rates on what they’re likely to perceive as riskier loans.
This administration has consistently acted to make housing more scarce and less affordable to middle-class homebuyers.
But it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Trump hasn’t done anything about housing affordability. In fact, his administration has consistently acted to make housing more scarce and less affordable to middle-class homebuyers. It’s hard to imagine Trump is trying to make the housing crisis worse, but he’s doing virtually everything that a president with that goal would do.
When it comes to cost of living, Trump’s biggest move has been the imposition of harsh tariffs on most of the rest of the world. Because manufacturers mostly pass the cost of tariffs on to consumers, they’ve made the vast majority of imported goods, and goods made with imported materials, more expensive. According to the center-right Tax Foundation, retail prices have risen about 5% as a result of Trump’s tariffs. Late last week, the president effectively admitted his error, signing an executive order exempting household staples such as coffee, beef and bananas from the tariffs.
Houses are not, of course, imported from abroad. But their construction requires many imported raw materials, including steel and lumber. By one measure, tariffs on those and other construction materials may be adding tens of billions of dollars to the cost of homebuilding investments across the country.
On top of those added costs, the administration has worked overtime to exacerbate a preexisting labor shortage in the construction industry. Immigrants constitute nearly one-third of the construction workforce (and an even higher share in, for example, California’s especially unaffordable housing market). Trump’s sadistic deportation campaign — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision to specifically target the day laborers who hang out at Home Depot waiting for work — is disappearing builders when the U.S. already didn’t have enough of them.
Contrary to popular belief, homebuilding is not an especially high margin industry; earlier this year, the National Association of Home Builders pegged the average net profit margin for developers at around 8.7% — close to the average across all industries. Anything that cuts deeper into that margin, particularly in markets where it is already expensive to build, is going to result in fewer new homes.
Any further effort to make housing more affordable faces serious headwinds, many of them emanating from the White House. The housing affordability crisis is primarily driven by high demand and limited housing supply in major metropolitan areas. Anything that raises the price of construction — such as mass deportations and ruinous tariffs — will only further constrict supply and make the problem worse. Undoing tariffs and halting the deportations might undo some of the damage on the supply side, but it wouldn’t get us any closer to a solution for the housing shortage. For that, the administration would need to support efforts to lift exclusionary zoning regulations — which restrict what types of housing can be built in a neighborhood or city — and streamline approval of new housing projects at the state and local level. But Trump is clearly unwilling to take these steps. An end to exclusionary zoning means greater integration in the suburbs along both race and income lines, as well as more apartment buildings in what were previously single-family-only neighborhoods — exactly the sort of outcome that many members of the MAGA coalition fear. In the 2020 election, Trump even accused Joe Biden of trying to “abolish the suburbs“ by building low-income housing in exclusive neighborhoods where there is currently none to be found. As a matter of fact, it was the Biden administration that took the first tentative steps toward serious federal action on the housing crisis. A bipartisan group of legislators has continued that push with the ROAD to Housing Act. That bill, which combines ideas from more than two dozen previously introduced bills with the goal of reducing housing prices, recently passed the Senate. But any further effort to make housing more affordable faces serious headwinds, many of them emanating from the White House. Pushing 50-year mortgages won’t come close to addressing the housing market’s real problems.
Ned Resnikoff is an urban policy analyst, researcher, writer, and editor. His byline has appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent, and The Nation. He writes the newsletter Public Comment, which can be found at publiccomment.blog. 
