After many failed attempts, the Obama Administration takes another whack at bolstering the nation’s housing market, this time by offering $5 to $10 billion in government aid for underwater homeowners to refinance their mortgages as detailed in this WSJ report.

On the one hand, you have to feel for homeowners who have continued to make their mortgage payments despite the declining value of their home, but can’t refinance at today’s freakishly low rates. But, on the other hand, you have to scratch your head about the government intervening to create new loans for more than theses homes are worth.

Those worrying about the latter shouldn’t be too concerned, however, as not much is likely to happen in Congress during this increasingly heated election year.

Not surprisingly, I’m going to have to agree with both Yale Economist Robert Shiller in this Business Insider interview and Barry Ritholtz at his Big Picture blog in arguing that a housing bottom – if it does indeed arrive in 2012 – will prove disappointing for those expecting gains on their real estate investment in 2013 or 2014.

As shown to the right using the mid-1990s Los Angeles housing market as an example of what might happen to national home prices in the years ahead, housing market bottoms are long drawn out affairs.

We happened to be living in Southern California at the time and had the good fortune to buy a house there in 1995, though, we were just looking for a place to live, not thinking of it as an investment.

I remember the price actually declined by another five percent or so in the year after we bought it and it wasn’t until five or six years later that we began to hear about rising home prices, a bit surprised to learn that the value of our place had increased by  $100,000 or more.

But, for the first few years, you were better off not even thinking about home values.

Using the broad Los Angeles price index as an example, even if you had bought at the absolute bottom in February 1996, you’d have had less than a one percent gain a year later.

The index spent a full four years within five percent of the February 1996 low!

Anyone thinking that a housing market bottom in 2012 means that home prices will be higher next year or the year after that will probably be disappointed.

Moreover, given the size of the recent boom and the likelihood of the bust being of similar magnitude, I wouldn’t be surprised if home prices don’t post a substantive advance for the rest of the decade.

It’s nothing like Vancouver, but, by U.S. standards, the ongoing housing boom in the nation’s capital is rather impressive, a point made clear in the graphic below from this Washington Post story following the release of the latest Case-Shiller home price data.

Note that the November index values for Detroit, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Cleveland wouldn’t show  up on the chart above as they have all fallen below the 100 mark, the latter three areas having done so over the last year or so while Detroit made the plunge back in early-2008, now sitting at a stunning 70.66 after falling another 2.4 percent.

Interestingly, after hosting one of the more spectacular bubbles last decade, Miami’s housing market is now within a point of the 20-city index.

Standard and Poor’s reported that the November data for the Case-Shiller Home Price Index indicated further declines, the 20-city index falling 1.3 percent for the second straight month as property values declined in 19 of the 20 cities, also for the second month in a row. On a year-over-year basis, the 20-city index is now down 3.7 percent.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, home prices were down only 0.7 percent with three cities seeing gains and David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Indices, was not hopeful when he noted the following:

Despite continued low interest rates and better real GDP growth in the fourth quarter, home prices continue to fall …  The trend is down and there are few, if any, signs in the numbers that a turning point is close at hand.

It looks like policy makers in Washington might want to accelerate plans for the next attempt at rescuing the housing market, that is, before prices fall too much further.