Hi Ben,
I am a San Diego investor as well. I purchased my first house hack in La Mesa last October with 5% down... If you have access to the VA I would highly recommend utilizing the 0% down option. I purchased by home for $730k and am renting out the additional rooms which makes it so I am only paying $500 a month for my mortgage currently.
I honestly am not a fan of a lot of the 2-4 unit options here because of the neighborhoods they are located in and a lot of the time the numbers just don't make sense. That being said, I am sure there are still deals to be had.
I prefer the single family option because of all of the flexibility that comes with owning your own land as opposed to a condo or townhome. For instance, we built a driveway with utility hookups that we are going to park an RV on and rent out which will make it so I am almost living for free. We also are in the process of interviewing various ADU companies to built a 1 bedroom which we can rent for around $2,200 a month. When all of that is said and done, we should be looking at around $7,500 in rental income with arounf $4,800 in mortgage payments including the ADU financing. If we had bought a condo we would be limited to what the market rents dictate for that area.
With that being said, it is better to get into the game and buy a condo if that is your only option for the amount you are pre-approved for.
There actually is a new option to use the rental income from a permitted ADU to help you qualify for more by using the predicted future rents of that unit in a SFH.