Unfortunately, as most of you know, home prices are outrageous here and finding a suitable home that I can then turn into a cash flowing buy/hold seems impossible, but I'm looking. 

Yes, I understand that property management is difficult and tenants can be pain but failure seems (a total loss of time and money) seems impossible to me.As an Owner occupant If I don’t have tenants then I could drop rent and although rent wouldn’t cover the mortgage it could at the minimum subsidize my living.

As a foreign newbie you will find it very very difficult (impossible) to get financing from a US bank or HML.

So if you buy and hold long term in Coastal So Cal (i.e. did not sell when the markets have depreciated) it has historically been virtually impossible to lose money (if you try real hard you may be able to find an area where you could have owned 10 years and lost money but you would have to try pretty hard to find that area and that 10 time span). 

Impossible, try couple dozen, plus paintings, plus vices, plus couple tens of thousand in credit card bills.

I totally agree with that for newbies that “no money down” is fairly impossible.

Unfortunately cash flow is impossible in NY/5 boroughs since properties are over priced.

I understand, that it is impossible to do rental comps online, without seeing the property, but, there still are some decent ways to do that

May be hard or impossible to find but have you heard of small local banks doing this?

With that being said, it is not impossible to get a good deal still on a property that will cash flow, if that is what your goal is.