Comment by justin66

> Say a 30Y payment is $1000/mo. A 50Y payment may be $800/mo.

Maybe? At present the 15-year fixed is at 5.57% and the 30-year is at 6.15%. It's impossible to predict what a 50-year mortgage would cost since we don't know what the government will throw at it or what goofily-named government-sponsored enterprises would be created to buy these mortgages, but... more. The tools banks use to measure the risk of a mortgage right now don't even apply if the common situation becomes that the house and the owner are likely to age out into decrepitude during the life of the loan.

If the 50-year becomes a real thing we can use the government to backstop all this and provide financial support when all the obvious things go wrong (at enormous taxpayer expense). Might as well, we provide a lot of stuff to keep the 30-year going, which is definitely not a loan that would exist otherwise. It's unwise to pretend that this is all a perpetual motion machine that's only going to make itself stronger over time if we use it cleverly.