The US just announced that they are working on a plan to introduce 50-year mortgages. I don't know what this plan entails, but my first reaction to the headline was: “Yeah, this is a bad idea.” But then I thought to myself, why is a 50-year amortization period too long? And is there any magic to 25- and 30-year mortgages?

At the most basic level, you could think of it this way: the average life expectancy of both sexes in America is currently 78.4 years. That means the average American would need to buy a home — with a 50-year mortgage — at 28.4 years old in order to fully pay it off by the time they die. At that point, why not rent?

A more rigorous analysis of amortization periods would likely involve a myriad of trade-offs related to housing affordability, homeownership rates, asset-price stability, household debt, overall financial risk, and other factors. But the primary feature of a long-ass mortgage is that it's alleged to make homeownership more attainable.

The obvious benefit of a 50-year mortgage is that it lowers a borrower’s monthly payment. For example, an $800,000 mortgage at 6% would create the following payments:

• 25-year amortization: $5,154 per month

• 30-year amortization: $4,796 per month

• 50-year amortization: $4,211 per month

But it's important to keep in mind that this is a synthetic affordability solution. It does not address fundamental constraints such as land use, zoning, construction costs, and the overall supply of new housing. Here's an excerpt from a speech that Carolyn Rogers, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, delivered last year:

"...we need to resist the temptation to try to solve the housing affordability challenge by tinkering too much with the mortgage market... leaning too much on measures that reduce the short-term cost of financing could have long-term impacts on the financial health of households, the mortgage market and the economy."

I like to think of real estate as a downstream industry. What I mean by this is that the demand for space — whether it be housing or office space — happens downstream from other underlying economic activities.

For example, if someone creates a successful business and then hires a bunch of new employees, at least two things happen. The company now needs to consume more office space, and the employees of this successful company will likely demand more housing. Maybe they're relocating for this new job, or maybe they just got a pay increase and now want to consume more housing.

Whatever the exact case, real estate is the tail of the dog, and the new and successful company is the dog itself. Sometimes real estate gets mistaken for the dog itself. Rising real estate values become a substitute (albeit a poor one) for genuine economic growth.

But this does nothing to help overall productivity and innovation. And eventually you'll need to find some bonafide dogs. That's why I think this recent op-ed (which was presented in partnership with Shopify) is an important one:

But nation-building isn’t only cranes and concrete. It’s also the builders who start companies and create new industries. If we want a prosperous future, Canada can’t just be a place that builds big things; it has to be a place that builds new things. A

Urbanation just released its Q3-2025 condominium market survey results for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Last quarter, a total of 319 new condominium apartments were sold across the entire region. This is the lowest quarterly total since Q3-1990 and is 92% below the latest 10-year average for Q3 periods. It also places us on track for the worst sales year in about three and a half decades. But this isn't news to anyone in the industry. And I'll remind you all that, in my view, now is the time for contrarianism, not conformity.

Here's something I found interesting in the data, though, and it ties into the above quote tweet. The average prices for unsold condominiums in Q3 were as follows:

• $1,315 psf for unsold pre-construction suites (i.e. projects in the pre-sale period)

• $1,199 psf for unsold developer-owned suites (i.e. remaining inventory in built projects)