>> >> shanna?>> everybody talks about competition in the market, and i think there always has to be that competition. right now fha, you may your mi, your mortgage insurance, for the life of the loan. and if you're in the private market, you can get that 80, you know, get 20, 25% equity, and you can get rid of that payment which is a very high payment right now. i think fha should just be one of the alternative products that are available, and people should not be pigeon holed into a particular product. i don't think it's the cheapest product. >> jerry? >> i agree completely. >> i worked at fha for five years, and i think it plays an essential role, but we don't want to see a world in which we have fha neighborhoods and private market neighborhoods. that has been in the past, as alex alluded to, an opportunity for the bad guys to sort of swarm into the program and to have a depressing effect on home values in the those communities. and i don't think we ought to have a world in which the government

>> >> shanna?>> everybody talks about competition in the market, and i think there always has to be that competition. right now fha, you may your mi, your mortgage insurance, for the life of the loan. and if you're in the private market, you can get that 80, you know, get 20, 25% equity, and you can get rid of that payment which is a very high payment right now. i think fha should just be one of the alternative products that are available, and people should not be pigeon holed into a particular product. i don't think it's the cheapest product. >> jerry? >> i agree completely. >> i worked at fha for five years, and i think it plays an essential role, but we don't want to see a world in which we have fha neighborhoods and private market neighborhoods. that has been in the past, as alex alluded to, an opportunity for the bad guys to sort of swarm into the program and to have a depressing effect on home values in the those communities. and i don't think we ought to have a world in which the government

. >> shanna?>> i think, also, in the poll they said greed, greed, greed and that greed came from wall street and the lenders, and, yeah, fannie and freddie should not have jumped into thearket and bought everything that they did. and in one respect something alex said earlier, i think i agree with, we've got to go back to a sensible housing market, and i believe if gses did not have shareholders, they wouldn't have dove into that. and dismantling gses doesn't quite make sense to me. i think you have to fix it, get rid of shareholders, get rid of that profit-driven area. but we cannot leave lending in this country in private -- in if this country in private market. they have discriminated against various groups, and we do investigations, and our most recent look at this within the last year and a half found that african-americans and latinos who were more qualified than whites who went in to inquire about a loan were given loan products, but the higher priced loan products. >> let's dive in right t

if we eliminate the role of the gse's i think the comments made by shanna and sarah and jerry howardre correct. we would have trouble sustaining the 30-year fixed rate mortgage. we would have trouble in times of economic retrenchment offering and continuing the strength of the housing sector which is so important to the economy. so the answer is, yes, if we eliminated them. i think what's going to occur is that we're going to keep some of the essential function. they won't be known as fannie and freddie and i don't know what happened to the buildings on wisconsin and out in mclean and all the people who were in them but some kind of different structure will exist because the function of securitization of collecting mortgages at the -- that's what happens when you talk about fannie and freddie. [laughter] >> yeah, yeah. [laughter] >> i think that the function of assembling mortgages, securitizing them and creating liquidity so that money could come back into the housing mortgage system is absolutely critical. other countries that don't have it seek it. and if we didn't -- if it didn't

shanna smith is president of the national fair housing alliance. bravely serve as executive director of the fair housing center of toledo, ohio. and alex pollock, resident fellow at the american enterprise institute, specializes in financial issues, formally served as president and ceo of the federal home loan bank of chicago. last night when we had a dinner that had all of our panelists, as well as some others, it was a rather glittering array of thinking and analysis about the housing industry. and i said then to paraphrase john f. kennedy, not since bill levitt dined alone had there been so much housing expertise in one place at one time. so we have a strong group for you to kind of kick around these issues. let me start with, you kw, what is the basic gap or dichotomy that we are oking at as you see in this poll, and even more eloquently in that video? americans remained attached to homeownership as an ideal in their own lives enormous percentages saying that they prefer it to renting. they would advise a family member to buy a home. 90% said t