The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that when 30-year amortizations for first-time home buyers with insured mortgages were announced in the 2024 federal budget, the government hailed them as a way to improve housing affordability for Canada's beleaguered millennial home buyers. Guest columnist Penelope Graham writes that the program -- which applies to anyone buying their first home with less than 20 per cent down, as long as it is new construction -- was rolled out at lenders across the country at the beginning of August. The uptake, Ms. Graham says, has been "crickets." Of the 290 mortgage applications received in August, just three requested the 30-year amortization option. This is unlikely to surprise anyone working in the mortgage industry; doubts over the program's efficacy have been raised from the start, largely due to the limited pool of who is eligible. When you factor in the cost of newly built housing, particularly in Canada's largest real estate markets such as Toronto, the numbers become largely unworkable. In July, the benchmark price for a newly built condo unit in Toronto was $1.02-million, while Altus Group notes that new Toronto home sales in July sank to another record monthly low.