Recoil, if you will, at the thought of a 50-year mortgage, but it's here.

A California mortgage company began to offer the loans in March to considerable media hoopla and touted them as a lifeline to consumers trying to squeeze into that state's ultra-pricey housing market.

The loans haven't caught on in a huge way, though a handful of lenders now offer them, and they are available nationwide.

Critics dismiss them as a poor choice or a marketing gimmick. But some in the industry say 50-year mortgages are finding their niche, and it may be just a matter of time before they are common. "We felt the loan would fill a need for some people to keep their payments lower," said Alex Diaz Jr., vice president of Statewide Bancorp, a mortgage company in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

In the second quarter Statewide originated about $92.1 million in 50-year loans in five states, Diaz said. That's a minuscule portion of the industry's $700 billion in all mortgage originations in the period.

Darren Weisberg, president of the Illinois Association of Mortgage Brokers, said he is not seeing "any activity on the loans" in Chicago. "It's too soon."

Dan Green, a mortgage planner with Mobium Mortgage Group in Chicago, said the loans recently have become available to Chicago-area borrowers through mortgage brokers who have business relationships with several national lenders that are offering them. Most of these lenders specialize in so-called "subprime" or "nonprime" loans.

Green said some of those credit-impaired borrowers might be good candidates for the 50s. The borrowers would use the ARM to leverage the equity from their homes to pay off debt and improve their credit scores _ then refinance out of the 50-year loan to something with better terms. "It's ironic that the longest available amortized loan is really a short-term solution for some people," Green said.

So far, most of the loans are in California, though a few lenders are marketing them nationally to subprime borrowers, who have spotty credit histories and are likely to pay higher interest rates.

"This is not a product that has been taking the world by storm," said Doug Duncan, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group in Washington, D.C. "From a statistical perspective they are practically nonexistent."

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