The housing mortgage market is an ever-changing tableau.

At one time, years ago, Americans shopping to buy their own home considered themselves lucky to find a bank to lend them the money. Bankers held the dough, the homebuyers had the desire, and the funds to buy the house were a prize that consumers wondered whether they could ever attain.

Lost in the process were two fundamental realities: first, owning your own home is one of our nation's fundamental dreams; second, the people lending the funds for the home were going to make a lot of money for the transaction. The country grew and prospered on middle-class people owning their own homes, and the economy boomed as the lenders became rich.

A generation ago, things began to turn. Banks then were the primary source of mortgage funds, the only way to obtain these vital loans. And in their collective wisdom, bankers grew skeptical of lending in certain older city neighborhoods. As their anxieties rose, homebuyers were shut out, and the problems were exacerbated. Street by street, block by block, entire neighborhoods began to decay, largely due to the lack of new homeowners able and willing to move into the housing stock. The debate raged: Do new buyers avoid looking in neighborhoods because of the decline, or do the neighborhoods decline because the lenders choose to withhold mortgage funds? Study after study revealed that it was the resolute decisions of the lenders to refuse mortgage loans that caused the problems. Bankers actually drew lines around certain sections they considered "too risky," then argued it wasn't them, it was the people who live there. This practice became known as "redlining," and government properly wrote regulations to reverse the damage the lenders had brought about. The new rules became known as the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA - some called it "community reinvestment act program," and their pet name for it was "CRAP."

But the results are there for all to see: A quarter century since those first early days of CRA regulations, city homeownership has boomed, entire neighborhoods, once moribund, are now revived. It was win-win: Community reinvestment worked, neighborhoods thrived and bank lenders prospered.

Now, 25 years later, it's no longer banks that are the primary home mortgage lenders. The business has changed, government-sponsored programs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have created a booming industry called the "secondary market" and new lenders, called mortgage companies, have sprung up that are not required to observe any CRA regulations. Studies reveal that in 1990, 78% of the mortgage loans were made by banks, while in 2000, that share had dropped to 30%.

Some housing activists are concerned that the new, booming industry has no community obligations, and it's an unfair advantage over the regulated banks. A Dorchester Ave. group, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Agency (MAHA,) is advocating for a bill which extends the provisions of the state's CRA laws to mortgage companies which make 500 or more mortgage loans in the state each year. The bill, termed "Act Establishing Community Reinvestment Obligations for Certain Mortgage Lenders," was passed by the State Senate last year, and now is being pushed by two Dorchester lawmakers, Rep. Marie St. Fleur and Rep. Martin Walsh, among others.

There are reports that Speaker Tom Finneran plans to announce his support for a package of housing initiatives in early May. The Speaker's support for this measure would be very timely, and we encourage him to take a leadership role in supporting the measure. - Ed Forry