I'd start by looking at where the money is going and how to increase your income and lower your spending. 

This is becoming more true for government employees clearly given the recent "Use It" act which will require 400,000 government employees to go from a remote to a hybrid role which started in January of 2024 and will continue to ramp up as time goes on (Source 1, Source 2)This trend will continue as companies realize more increasingly they need to be at least hybrid to be competitive.

They tell you to request to market, but there is a max allowable increase which is a joke.

Wood has a huge variability in strength--between pine varieties, the stress which can cause them to fail varies by more than 2x and you can see 20%+ increase in strength as it ages.Then I have stress concentrations which will yield and then redistribute the load in practice, but not according to the calculations I'm allowed to do. 

You will likely need to sit on the unit for a long time or reduce initial rent below the market for that unit to rent during the Winter. account for this by either offering a Winter special that will increase to market in the Spring or doing a short lease that ends in the Summer.

If JC is a must, that's fine you'll do well with appreciation and rent increasing depending on the market with in city.

There are some locations to stay away from but almost every single sub market of KC has value and increasing rents.

As a result, you might end up increasing your taxes by delaying income and accelerating deductions.Did I miss something?

If an asset is throwing off a certain yield that is not commiserate with it's risk, then investors will then begin paying more for that asset, thus decreasing it's yield....or start paying less for the asset which would increase it's yield, until it was at the proper risk/return rate to produce the yield that is truly reflective of it's risk.The problem is novice real estate investors get the risk/reward correlation backwards.

You can refinance sooner than that but you'll need to paper trail all of the improvement costs that lead to the increase in value.