Real-estate agents are weathering a tough housing market, with slow sales, falling prices and bloated inventory.

Industry veterans, however, say it’s not the worst they’ve seen, not with interest rates last week for 30-year fixed mortgages at a low 5.96 percent, which makes houses affordable to many.

For a really lousy market, they say, look back to 1991 and 1992, when a recession sapped consumers’ buying power, foreclosed properties from failed credit unions and banks were dumped on the market, loans were hard to get because lenders tightened credit standards, and interest rates for the best customers rose well above 8 percent. Now that’s a bad market, they say.

I agree with them, but only to a point.

That’s because it’s still not clear when the current market slump will bottom out. Every time an organization, including the National Association of Realtors, forecasts when house prices will stabilize and start to go up, the estimates are revised, pushing the timetable further out. The New England Economic Project, a respected regional analyst, estimates that median prices in Rhode Island will continue to fall, 5 percent this year, 5 percent next year and 5 percent again in 2009.

Here’s another big concern.

Most of the focus on the subprime lending mess, and the increasing number of foreclosures, has been in urban areas. That’s where the predatory lenders pushed loans to low-income people who had no business getting a mortgage they couldn’t afford. It’s also where the speculators took out subprime loans to buy up property.

Now, the subprime crisis is moving into the suburbs.

There are about 2 million adjustable subprime mortgages that are scheduled to reset to higher interest rates by the end of 2008. Many were made to people with weak credit histories or with low-interest, teaser rates to allow borrowers to buy a bigger house and meet the monthly payments.

Those resets will push initial rates of 6 percent to 8 percent up to 9 percent to 11 percent. The monthly payment on a typical mortgage will go up by $350, taking it from $1,200 to $1,550.

Many families won’t be able to afford the new payments and could fall into default, losing their houses to foreclosure.

More than 30 percent of borrowers with subprime adjustable-rate mortgages are already behind in their payments, even before their loans reset higher. About 775,000 houses with $143 billion of mortgage debt will go into foreclosure over the next two years, according to estimates from analysts at Credit Suisse Group, an investment bank.

In Rhode Island, a new report from the Mortgage Bankers Association found the delinquency rate on home mortgages surged to the highest in New England.

The resetting mortgages, and the fear that more foreclosures will roil financial markets and push the country into a recession, have set off a frantic, eleventh-hour scramble in Washington to head off the crisis. When politicians get nervous and come up with solutions, taxpayers should beware.

The Bush administration last week announced a rescue plan, the centerpiece of which was an agreement among some of the big banks, mortgage companies and Wall Street investors to freeze interest rates for five years for some homeowners facing the resetting of their adjustable-rate mortgages. Not everyone will be eligible. Only those who got adjustable, subprime mortgages between Jan. 1, 2005, and July 31 of this year and are facing a sharp jump in rates can apply. Excluded would be those who don’t live in their houses or those already delinquent in their payments.

The plan is also a push to get homeowners to refinance their mortgages with their private lenders or get their loans secured by the Federal Housing Administration.

“This is no silver bullet,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged. “But clearly it will ease the risks from the housing slump.”

Still, the controversial plan quickly attracted opposition.

Housing advocates said it will help only a small segment of those at risk of losing their houses.

The Center for Enterprise, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., called the plan “bad policy” because it altered the terms of hundreds of thousands of contracts, making investors worldwide think twice about investing in the U.S. mortgage business.

Closer to home, Peter Nigro, professor of finance at Bryant University, called the plan a “bailout” and said it would hurt investors, banks and, ultimately, taxpayers.

Instead of a government bailout, “let each bank and other financial institution resolve the problems that are least costly to them,” he said. “They are in a better position to assess their losses compared to the government … in cases of fraud and predatory loans, let’s go after the companies and brokers that made them.”

The controversy also sparked comments from lawmakers in Congress, and the candidates for president, all of whom suggested steps that needed to be taken to avoid a housing recession.

There were calls for federal legislation to give state and local governments more authority to temporarily broaden their tax-exempt bond programs to include mortgage refinancing. Others wanted passage of bills expanding the availability of Federal Housing Administration insured loans to refinance loans about to reset.

By week’s end, housing analysts were evaluating all the proposals. Soon, something has to get done. There’s too much pressure from the danger the housing mess poses for the economy. How effective the federal response is still remains to be seen.

Eventually, all bad housing cycles end. The one during the 1991-1992 recession was over by 1994.

This one’s still developing. Only when it’s past will history rank just how bad it was.