Rhode Island’s deteriorating job market is expected to delay its recovery from what a new study describes as the nation’s worst housing downturn in a generation.

The 2008 State of the Nation’s Housing report that Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released today says mounting job losses during the first three months of this year are “raising the risks of even sharper price declines and higher delinquencies ahead.”

“Those parts of the Northeast that are losing jobs are going to take longer to come out of this,” said the center’s director, Nicolas P. Retsinas. “I don’t think there will be a quick recovery.”

In most of New England, Retsinas said, the housing market problems should begin to abate by next spring— but Rhode Island may be the exception.

In Rhode Island, about 1 in 41 mortgages, on average, were in foreclosure during the fourth quarter of last year, the seventh-highest in the nation, according to the report. The foreclosure rate was highest (1 in 25 loans) in Ohio, where layoffs and weak job growth have driven more homeowners into default.

Nationally, industry experts say, states with the highest foreclosure rates generally fall into two groups: the building-boom states and the rust-belt states. In Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona, which account for more than half of foreclosures nationally, risky loans fueled overbuilding which, when the housing market turned, left tracts of empty developments. Then there are the rust-belt states such as Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana, where the biggest economic driver behind the high foreclosure rates is job losses.

Rhode Island, with its shrinking manufacturing base, low-wage service jobs and older cities is, at least in this real estate crisis, economically more akin to its Midwest peers.

On Friday, Rhode Island labor officials reported that the state last month shed 1,800 more jobs and its unemployment rate soared to 7.2 percent — the highest in 14 years.

So far this year, Rhode Island has lost 7,900 payroll jobs and the ranks of its unemployed have swelled to 41,100 in what economists say is the worst recession since the early 1990s. That recession began with the collapse of the commercial real estate markets, in 1989, and dragged down just about every sector of the state’s economy. It lasted three years.

“The state’s economy is engulfed in a self-reinforcing negative cycle where the housing market has undermined the job market,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Economy.com. “The problems become amplified and feed on each other.”

In Rhode Island, 7 percent of all first mortgages during January, February and March were delinquent or in foreclosure. In Massachusetts it was 5.1 percent and nationwide 5.9 percent, according to Moody’s Economy.com. The state with the highest share of troubled mortgages was Florida, with 10.4 percent.

And credit industry data, Zandi said, show that the rate of home foreclosures in Rhode Island continues to rise.

The latest forecast from Economy.com predicts that house prices in Rhode Island will decline 14.4 percent from the first-quarter of this year through next year, before hitting bottom in the first quarter of 2010.

Nationally, high levels of foreclosures will continue to depress house prices, especially in neighborhoods with large populations of low-income and minority residents where riskier “subprime” loans are most heavily concentrated, according to the report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Among other findings in the report:

•Rhode Island’s high foreclosure rate is being fueled by its large share of risky “subprime” mortgages, which particularly appealed to buyers of rental properties seeking to cash in on the housing boom. Now, as house prices have declined, many of those properties are worth less than what the borrowers paid for them — prompting some investors to simply walk away.

•The share of investor-owned mortgages in the Providence metro area (which includes Fall River) climbed as high as 17.4 percent during the third quarter of last year — more than double the national average, according to the report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

•Rhode Island’s share of “seriously delinquent” mortgages during the fourth quarter of last year was 3.9 percent, the highest in New England. In Florida, where the mortgage market has been hardest hit, the rate was 5.2 percent, and in Ohio, it was 5.9 percent.

•Despite production cuts rivaling those in the 1978-1983 real estate downturn, the number of vacant “for sale” houses on the market nationwide failed to shrink during the first quarter of this year.

•The months’ supply of unsold new single-family houses rose to more than 11 months nationally in late 2007 and early 2008—a level previously not seen since the 1970s—before dropping back slightly. Nationally, the supply of existing single-family houses for sale in April jumped to 10.7 months.

In Rhode Island, it would take 15 months to sell all the single-family houses on the market during the first quarter of this year, up from 11 months a year earlier, according to an analysis of data from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors and Statewide Multiple Listing Service. The market is generally considered balanced when the supply is about 6 months.

The supply of multifamily houses in the state during the first quarter was 19 months, and the supply of condos was 22 months, the data shows.

larditi@projo.com