One thing that helps protect the housing market is the rental market. People have to live somewhere. If rents go up and apartments get harder to attain, there will be more people motivated towards buying a house despite the extra mortgage costs.
At the same time look at what the government did to landlords using the “pandemic” as a backdrop to prevent landlords from evicting deadbeats. By the time they were able to evict, the rentals were often in shambles and the deadbeats walked away without being held financially accountable often times. By this time landlords were under water and many simply dumped the properties. This was no fault of the landlords, but rather an attack on Capitalism by a communist leaning government.