The economy isn’t going back to February 2020. Fundamental shifts have occurred.

Susan Wachter, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Institute for Urban Research, predicts the nation is on the verge of a rental housing crisis. At the end of this month, the national eviction moratorium expires, and many landlords are eager to bump up rent and force out tenants who lost jobs in the crisis. At the same time, investors have scooped up cheap single-family homes in the hopes of renting them out for good profits. Single-family home rents were already up 5.3 percent a year as of April, according to research firm CoreLogic.