Looked at another way ...

It takes intent, effort, and cunning in massive amounts and in constant measure – everywhere, in everything, and all at once – to produce unaffordability, unattainability, and a lack of access to a decent home at the scale we now see it here in the U.S.

These efforts – many of the most sinister of them so taken for granted or baked in that they're not even named or appreciated as force factors – work with two sets of switches and levers.

One: keep raising the costs of planning, developing, producing, and, ultimately, living in ground-up homes, neighborhoods, and communities.

The other: keep weighing down households' upward financial striving and their ability to transform hard, constant, productive work lives into substantial signs of that mobility.

Affordability, after all, can only come from a combination of bending cost barriers downward and the arc of payment power and potential upward.

Affordability's inverse – a state of things that has effectively made homeownership a luxury and renting a decently desirable home practically a pipedream for any working household in the 80%-to-120% AMI zone – bends those cost barriers up and payment power down.

Into that taut framing comes this:

In a parallel-reality context, Derek Thompson, co-author with Ezra Klein of Abundance, offers this thought (with my edits):

The ATOE [affordability theory of everything] has some subtle advantages. It’s a big tent strategy...

... Affordability is not a policy. It’s barely even an idea. It’s just a word—a useful word that connects .... in a way that establishes ... new identity as a problem solving machine in an age of incompetent venality. But eventually you get power and you have to actually solve problems. And that, as Matt Yglesias would say, is where the real work begins.

It is in this way we might look at a fresh flow of policy trial balloons launched out of the White House and the FHFA designed to "move fast and break things" against a backdrop that has, for decades, and is currently producing housing unaffordability like it's going out of style.

The "real work," as Yglesias refers to it, means making it less damned easy to say "no," and to say "wait," and to effect "no," when it comes to building more affordably, more attainably, and more profitably.

Take the 50-year mortgage idea for what it is — not a plan, not a fix, but a flare.

It’s the kind of norm-shattering notion that immediately lights up the political sky. It pulls the cameras in, forces every pundit and policy wonk to take sides, and temporarily shifts the national conversation from inflation, rates, and partisanship to something more elemental: how —and for whom —America makes homes possible.

If that’s all it does, it will have served some purpose.

Because for all its impracticalities, a proposal like this cuts through the chronically deep fog of “incrementalism.” It reminds us that the status quo itself is a radical act — the radical act of keeping things stuck.

Fifty-year mortgages would stretch the already-thin margins of ownership even further, pushing debt service into a kind of hereditary mortgage. It’s unlikely that lenders, regulators, or secondary markets would embrace such a product without massive distortions.

But that may be beside the point.

The point is that it dares the rest of us — the local planners, builders, lenders, officials, neighbors, and investor stakeholders — to show we can do better — and deserve better — than this gesture from on high.

Because if Washington’s answer to unaffordability is to make the debt longer, not the homes cheaper or the paychecks stronger, that’s an indictment — not an innovation.

What it also is, though, is a provocation. Provocations have a purpose. This one implicitly asks: what would it take to make a home truly attainable without bending physics, math, or morality?

That’s where the real work begins — the kind that happens in city councils, zoning boards, utility districts, and builder offices. The kind that involves dirt, design, and courage. The kind that doesn’t show up in social media algorithms or presidential talking points.

Because affordability, at its core, is a locally manufactured product – one we're just not making much of anywhere.

Every extra hearing, every redundant permit, every layer of process, review, and litigation is a cost-inflation machine. Every neighborhood that votes “no” to density, every infrastructure project deferred, every delay in connecting new supply to actual need — all of it compounds. And when you multiply that by tens of thousands of jurisdictions, you get exactly the system we have now: one that produces precisely the outcome we pretend to lament.

Trump and Pulte’s 50-year mortgage doesn’t fix that machine. But it does highlight how desperate we’ve become for anything that even sounds like relief. It’s a sign of national fatigue — a measure of how long the distance has grown between household economics and policy imagination.

So maybe the gift in this idea isn’t in the mechanism but in the mirror it holds up. Because if we can get people talking about what “affordability” really means — what it would take to bend both sides of the equation in the right direction, and importantly, who's working 24/7 to thwart it and why — then something helpful can happen.

We might finally start to confront the real dual mandate: not just to make the cost curve flatter, but to make the income curve steeper. That’s not the work of mortgage math. That’s the work of productivity, education, mobility, and opportunity — the connective tissue between wages, wealth, and worth.

The builders and developers who’ve chosen to operate in this market already know it. They fight it every day — the death by a thousand cuts of delay, resistance, and cost accretion. But they also know that small wins at the local level can scale. One city revises its parking minimums. Another legalizes duplexes or trims permit timelines. A utility agrees to faster hookups. Each “yes” compounds, too.

That’s where affordability gets built — not in 50-year spreadsheets, but in five-year plans that actually happen.

There’s a kind of leadership vacuum that emerges when national politics reduces complex structural issues to symbols and slogans. A void opens, and someone has to fill it. Local leadership — civic, private, institutional — is the only force with both proximity and accountability enough to do it.

If a policy gambit from Washington does anything, let it reawaken that muscle. Let it remind every mayor, planner, and builder that the answer isn’t a longer mortgage; it’s a shorter distance between intent and impact.

The path out of unaffordability will look less like a new loan product and more like a re-wiring of local systems — zoning that reflects demographic reality, infrastructure that anticipates growth, education and training that raise household earning power, and partnerships that close the gap between what homes cost to make and what working families can pay.

So yes, take the 50-year idea seriously, but not literally. Take it as a dare — a public challenge to everyone who says they care about housing but acts as if the math is immutable. Because if the federal government can throw a moonshot like that into the conversation, surely cities, counties, builders, and lenders can take their own moonshots closer to home.

In the end, affordability is not a gift to be granted from Washington. It’s a covenant to be renewed in every community that still believes in the promise of work, home, and upward motion.

That’s the real work — the only kind that ever lasts longer than 50 years.