2% interest rates may have been needed in areas of the country hit hard by Covid, but they destroyed the housing market in places like Massachusetts with serious housing shortages and high rents where most of the jobs kept right on trucking and just moved to work from home. There was a 2 fold effect. First off, since there aren’t now and haven’t been for years as many single family homes as there are people who want to buy them, the bidding wars we’ve been seeing on every decent house for the last 20 years spiked up because people could suddenly spend more money and keep the same monthly payment. And secondly with the housing market booming and rents remaining high it became almost a no brained for middle aged people with enough liquid retirement money to put down 20% to outbid young people trying to buy starter homes by offering “all cash” (they were actually taking out mortgages but had enough economic stability and extra funds available that they didn’t need mortgage contingencies on their offers) for the condos those young people should have been buying and then renting them back to the same people at rents so high they were making more money off that 20% down after paying their mortgage, any upkeep and hiring a property manager to take care of their tenants to do way better than they would have done if they left that money in stocks. It’s an awful situation that we will be feeling the effects of for a generation.