Once U.S. house prices start recovering, how long will it take to return to the peaks of a few years ago?

A new study from the Federal Housing Finance Agency suggests that we shouldn’t be holding our breath.

The study by the FHFA, the agency that regulates government-backed mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, looks at local and regional housing busts over the past several decades based on its own price indexes. It finds that it can take more than 10 years for prices to return to their previous peaks after they start to fall. The drop from the peak tends to be much swifter than the recovery.

For cities with busts between 1975 and the present, the study examines the duration from the start of a decline in real, or inflation-adjusted, prices to the return to the prior peak. The median duration was 10.75 years, but sometimes downturns can be much longer. For instance, in Midland, Texas, inflation-adjusted prices fell 56% between 1982 and 2000 before starting to recover. They still haven’t returned to the 1982 level.

The report, prepared by the FHFA’s Jesse Weiher, cautions that “the applicability of historical trends to the current U.S. house-price downturn may be limited.” For one thing, the boom of the first half of this decade sent prices up at an extraordinary rate. For another, past downturns typically have been caused by steep drops in employment, such as those caused in Texas by the oil slump of the 1980s or in Southern California by an aerospace bust in the early 1990s.

By contrast, the current house price drop began while the job market was still strong and is partly due to a financial crisis that has made mortgage loans much harder to obtain. In addition, prices rose far faster than incomes during the recent housing boom, pricing many people out of the market. Only recently have prices fallen to affordable levels.