Count Gloom, Boom & Doomer Marc Faber as one more in a rapidly expanding group of housing bulls, the long-time market analyst commenting in this CNBC story today that there is value in the southern states where property prices continue to fall.

“If you look at the supply of homes, new construction, and compare it to immigration into the United States, to the growth of the population, then these (southern) markets are very attractive from a longer term perspective,” Faber told Bernie Lo on CNBC’s Straight Talk.

Among the markets he pointed to were Atlanta, Phoenix and Miami. Faber said investors could earn a rental yield of 8 percent per year and buy homes in the south of the U.S. at a 40 to 50 percent discount to construction costs.

Faber said he went to see homes in Phoenix and Atlanta, and in some cases, U.S. homes were cheaper than those in Thailand, where he lives.

At the same time, the fact that people couldn’t get credit to buy homes in the U.S. was helping to boost the rental market, he added.

It is rather remarkable what is happening in a place like Atlanta. According to the latest Case-Shiller home price data, they’ve recently overtaken Cleveland and Phoenix while rapidly closing in on Las Vegas in what is, for some cities, an ongoing race to the bottom. Detroit remains the unquestioned leader in the group, however, extrapolating recent trends would see Atlanta claim that title by the end of the year.

While the debate about whether the U.S. housing market has hit bottom is certainly heating up, hopefully it won’t rise to the current temperature of the brouhaha over whether last Friday’s labor market report was good, bad, indifferent, or just an outright fabrication by the Obama administration in an increasingly contentious election year.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell the politics from the statistics when trying to make sense of  last Friday’s monthly jobs report and, at this point, I don’t care anymore.

As for the housing market, none other than Bill McBride at the wildly popular Calculated Risk blog weighed in on the subject yesterday declaring The Housing Bottom Is Here, a view that you find out at the end of the article isn’t quite as strongly held as you might think from just reading the title.

Bill notes there are two housing markets – new home construction and existing home sales – and, while the former has clearly made a bottom, the latter is likely to do so next month, though he qualifies that prediction with words like “I think that house prices are close to a bottom” and there being “a reasonable chance that the bottom is here”.

Now, caveats notwithstanding, this is still a big deal since Calculated Risk isn’t just an ordinary offering out there in the blogosphere. This particular blog happened to be calling the US housing market a bubble back when few had an inkling of the trouble to come and, for that reason alone, his is an opinion worth listening to.

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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.