I don't buy that without citations. Everyone knows housing markets are like most other markets and go both up and down in cycles. Like most other markets, the bigger the boom, the bigger the bust that follows.
To say that a majority of economists believed otherwise seems like pure hyperbole to me.
“It’s not just that they missed it, they positively denied that it would happen,” says Wharton finance professor Franklin Allen, arguing that many economists used mathematical models that failed to account for the critical roles that banks and other financial institutions play in the economy. “Even a lot of the central banks in the world use these models,” Allen said. “That’s a large part of the issue. They simply didn’t believe the banks were important.”
They were fundamentally unprepared and many were unwilling to even entertain the idea that the housing market could collapse. That’s what made stories like The Big Short so surreal, they had all these experts telling them that they were wrong, and economists played a major role in that episode.
0: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-economists-f...
Which is probably a big reason why many economists weren't watching harder. If the banks are reporting things are fine while incentivizing bad loans on the down low then it's not especially surprising that a data driven field was caught offguard by tainted information.
[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=467926...
Also 2008 surprised almost everyone, so saying economists couldn't predict it is not much of a slander. Neither could banks, governments, hedge funds, or multiple other groups whose business it was to watch out for events like that.