why not develop something more proven like hotel on portions of it and make this a larger development and carve out pieces?

If the only MFH options you're finding are in areas you're not comfortable with, it might be worth focusing on a duplex in a better neighborhood.Saving up for a larger property later is a valid approach too, but keep in mind that real estate tends to appreciate over time, and waiting might make it harder to enter the market later.

There are likely larger users out than than what I deal with, but at that SF at least in my world you are likely looking at multiple tenants, not sure if thats what you planned or not.additionally something else to consider is the cost of buildout on a med office space. depending if they are going to have x ray or not its not uncommon to see $500-$800K buildouts in my experience. 

Imagine making millions of dollars over the course of your career and then having to pay 30-50% every year to uncle sam instead of compounding that cash over time.This is exactly what real estate professionals have learned to mitigate.To reduce their taxable income, they just buy a building every year, do a cost seg, and use depreciation to reduce their tax liability dramatically.Their personal wealth snowball grows much larger and much faster than their W2 counterparts who give most of their money back to the government each year.Following this strategy as a real estate professional is one of best ways to end up with a much larger net worth at the end of your career.

I guess they can feel blessed they weren’t crushed and sent out of business by the rampant theft that forced closures of even larger and well funded grocery stores in Detroit, Chicago, LA and NYC. 

I believe they eventually sold for a huge profit and 1031’d into a larger property.

We are already partnering on multiple properties so this is part of a larger plan, I just was wondering if there were other ways to think about the proportion of cash to equity.

A good condo board should be saving money for larger projects as they are known in advance (eg every 25 years you need a new roof). 

At that point I am delaying retirement just to grow my accounts to a size larger than I need, that doesn’t make sense to me.I understand that by stopping those tax advantaged accounts I could be missing out on additional growth over the long run.

We have 40k in the bank and 100k equity in our current house (but we can't afford a larger payment on our current residence).