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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

Barely, month to month. At current rates a $2700 mortgage might go to about $2400...

... in exchange for over a million dollars more paid over the life of the loan.

I don't think that's making any meaningful difference to anyone other than lenders.

If you increase mortgages to 50 years and keep the number of houses too low, houses prices will go up until the monthly payments return to the level of borderline unaffordability.

Another way to think about it. Longer mortgages means more available buyers (for a given price level). More buyers means prices up.

This will mean extending loans to those that current lenders are not making loans too. So rates will have to increase in order cover increased defaults (the borrowers aren't different). Increasing interest rates will drop prices.

Or maybe it's the reverse.

Also true. Just like every time (not that it's happened recently, at least at the federal level, more common at the state) minimum wage has risen, you can basically track an increase in rental prices to ever so seamlessly absorb every cent of it within a matter of months...

None of this is being done for the actual struggling people in the community.

It might work if inflation is high and you make extra payments at the beginning of the loan. So you have 50 years to pay it off doesn’t mean you have to make minimum payments, you could get the principle down at the beginning and then get your repayments redone later in the loan to have something manageable. Inflation and appreciation would eat away at the loans value, you would be paying off a loan from 30 years ago with today’s money, your property taxes would likely be more than your house payment by then.

However, USA’s fixed interest rates, and your ability to refinance to a lower rate, aren’t really sustainable in a 59 year loan (they aren’t sustainable for 30 year loans). A lot of people are going to be locked into the same house for generations because they got a good rate 30-40 years ago. Also, it doesn’t really increase supply, we are going to quickly degrade into a European housing market of interest only loans and renting as a normal way of life.

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