Housing has also become a crisis here. It's a multifaceted, compounded issue so you can't point the finger at just one thing and say 'that is the problem!'.
The first is that housing market has been artificially inflated by money laundering.
The second is that we have unsustainable immigration. Big corporations like Walmart and Amazon want cheap labour. Everything that can be offshored has already been done - manufacturing, call centers, etc. But they can't move the sales to cheaper countries (because the people working for pennies can't afford to buy the stuff). So instead, they import those workers to do service work, warehouse work, delivery driving etc. This inflates the demand for low income rentals and housing. So the housing meant for low income residents of our country are now taken up by low income foreign workers.
The third problem is sort of connected to the first two. Real estate is being utilized as an investment vehicle. People buy up property, and since it does not depreciate in value (the land that is), and are using properties as VRBOs or AirBnBs and using the revenue to pay off mortgages. While this sounds like a clever way to make money and gain an asset, it also raises market prices while removing housing from the market. (I do tax returns for some of these and have thoughts on actually how profitable this is, but that's for another day).
And, understandably, the people who do have mortgages don't want to see the value of their purchase plummet. If you have a mortgage for a home for $500,000, you don't want the value of your home to decrease below that.
When I was looking to buy my house near ten years ago, there were quite a few homes on the market were extremely overpriced (old houses that needed a lot of work and repairs being sold at the same price as newer houses that didn't need new basement walls). But it wasn't because they were trying to profit, it was because they just wanted to make enough to pay off their mortgage.
Imo the easiest solution is to fix the above two problems, and allow the housing market to cool down - that is, allow housing to at least freeze where its at instead of increasing exponentially every year so that the few can rake in mounds of cash they won't even spend.
Tldr; longer mortgage terms don't address the root of the problem (why housing prices have skyrocketed), and will only allow this issue to continue to compound.
