Last year a tenant left out a cigarette (non smoking property) and the house burned down and I had to rebuild.

Infested with Roaches and cigarette smoke residue.

If you make 8% return and adjust for inflation, you have a gain of 1%. 1% gain is better than smoking a cigarette containing plutonium. 9 to 5 till 65 (while saving) might get you an extra year in a care home before you run out of funds and Medicaid kicks in.

Am afraid your lease was not descriptive enough and may have a tough time in court.Take this as a lessons learned and start working on improving your lease from the things you are seeing with current tenants and then wait it out if you can, which you seem to indicate you can do.Even with a very tight lease, I paid close to $3000 in evictions not to mention the heartache from tenants that I inherited on my first duplex purchase where I lived on one side and rented the other.I will never again inherit tenants.These ones moved in an extra person a year and a half in, despite lease saying not to, smoked marijuana and cigarettes in house despite lease saying not to and worse, I lived on property so they became very sneaky about how they broke their lease and these was just a nightmare.I hate evictions, but I equally hate bad tenants and tenants that I have not personally screened and that is why I refuse to take on tenants at property purchase.I also always, always do unit inspections.I just did one yesterday and glad I did, which I had initially decided I would not do, but nope, get in there and see how your property is being maintained.My fairly new tenant seems to have an issue with basic housekeeping.There was a smell in the unit, which I still cannot figure out what it is, but brought it to their attention and will be following up, he has a car that leaks oil endlessly on my newly resurfaced concrete driveway and garage flow, has a ring in toilet bowl that is also stained and smelling toilet from lack of cleaning.It pains me to see a unit that I took great care of when I lived in it to see what it is quickly turning into but I am nipping that in the butt right now.Dirty tenants can be a liability to any landlord, but overall tenants will try to test you and see just how vigilant you are and how much they can get away with.I also make notes on what I want to update on my next lease when I run into issues.Pets?

Do they communicate well, do their vehicles leak oil or are messy, do they enjoy talking to people, do they smell like cigarettes? 

Some people's sinuses work this way and any smell can highly set them off where they are miserable.In an older building the shared ducting might cause an issue where they get other smells from connected units.Was a previous smoker there?

You'd be better off doing small short term loans to mobile home dwellers who cash their pay check at the local check into cash and then buy their groceries, cigarettes and scratch tickets at the convenience store.

They spend what little they do have on drugs, booze & cigarettes.

In another case a drunk tenant fell asleep and his cigarette started the deck on fire.

Just like how the cigarette industry used to give millions to children's cancer research, to have something to say in defense of themselves when they were accused of a hideously immoral business model.Going back to our original dichotomy, though: nobody ever focuses on (b) in social problems, Eric.