Industrial / Commercial Property in Kansas City house hack?

[Dustin Beam]

Hello beautiful people of BP,

My wife an I have talked a while about moving more into the heart of KC, but we've hesitated with a little one in tow (<1 year old ) and the current state of the public KCMO school system. If we knew we could get her into one of the good charter schools (lottery system, so pure chance to get in I guess), we might just look at a simple SFH and stay there until we die or downsize later in life. But since that's not the case, I would need to move to a place that I could essentially house hack by renting out part of the building and living in the other.

So why am I posting about a basic house hack you ask? Well, we aren't really interested in a traditional duplex. Ideally, we could find a brick industrial type building where we could rent the ground level commercially for about the PITI, and live close to rent free above in a loft like space. Then, if our daughter didn't get into a good school in 5 years, we could move to a better school district and hopefully not lose much if any on the sale of the building....or simply keep in and continue renting.

So to keep this long post from getting too long, for those of you familiar w/ this type of property in KC, is that realistic? Feel free to assume that zoning and whatnot will be ok, I would check that obviously before purchasing. I simply haven't rented commercial property before and am unsure of how feasible this would be.

Rough idea of area would be:     In Missouri, South of the river, West of Troost. Southern border is more flexible.