The public anxiety is in reaction to an economy that is veering toward recession and losing jobs even as the housing market sputters badly. Foreclosures have soared to record highs, mortgage rates have increased, sales of existing and new homes have fallen and home values have dropped.

Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics for Moody's Economy.com, a consulting firm, estimated that 9 million homeowners owe more on their home than it's worth. He said his company believes home sales are at or near bottom and home values will continue to fall until early next year.

Even so, he said, many people bought their homes before the run-up in values that started around 2001 and remain in good shape.

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"So the value of your house goes down temporarily," he said. Unless the homeowner must sell now or can't afford the payments, "that doesn't have that much of an impact."

The poll also found:

The biggest worriers are those expecting to buy soon. Of that group 43 percent frets that their home's value will drop in the next two years, compared with 25 percent of those not expecting to buy shortly.
Fifty-nine percent think now is a good time to buy.
Half think this is a very tough time for first-time buyers, an increase from two years ago. Nearly two-thirds think it's harder for first-home buyers than it was five years ago.

The AP-AOL Money & Finance poll was conducted from March 24-April 3 by Abt SRBI Inc. It involved telephone interviews with 1,002 adults nationwide, for whom the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

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Answer Desk: Why bail out homeowners?

Included were interviews with 769 homeowners, for whom the sampling margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 points. The margin of sampling error for other subgroups was larger.

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