I think that is well answered by the other responses but felt I could add some insights from previous downturns.
First, a friend of mine made a bit of extra cash by driving u-haul trailers and trucks back to the bay area. He did this on a case by case basis by showing up at the various u-haul places and offering his services. Generally they would rent him the equipment for "free" and pay him expenses plus a small fee when he returned with the item. Personally I don't think it covered the mileage on his truck but he enjoyed the drives.
Second, a lot of storage places "filled up" with excess inventory from people who rent furniture. I'm not sure if they learned their lesson and now have a warehouse standing by or what.
Third people who had some runway would hang around looking for new/different work for a reasonably long time, so the impact on their freeing up housing was diffuse.
And finally, the impact on traffic was the most notable. Improvment projects that had added efficiency in the dot com boom were now over provisioned for the traffic they carried. It was actually pretty reasonable to drive up and down Highway 101 and I-x80 at "rush hour."
Anecdotally, a significant number of houses that had been built on spec in my neighborhood, and took bids in 1999, fell out of escrow in 2001 before they could be occupied. One sat unoccupied for 5 years. Because the company that owned it could not sell it for what they paid and they were unwilling to take on the expense/complication of leasing it out. That would be harder to happen, the primary reason the houses fell out of escrow is that the down payments were in "stock" which became worthless. And the lack of liquidity in this downturn means that fewer people could sell their equity to fund a down payment and eventual balloon payment. My "test case" is the set of new houses that were built at the corner of Iowa and Taffe in Sunnyvale. They seem to have similar timing.