.- Someone talked about crime and hard tenants (who don't pay - usually inherited ones)- not many economic opportunities to attract pool of people and boost area etcI'm looking at houses on both sides (Canada and USA) US, they are cheaper like 731 Pine Ave, Niagara FAlls NY 14301 going for $270,000 (5/2, 2700sq ft) but on Can side, it's like houses are in the US$400K - smaller sq ft.

In your example, $250 in utility bills is much cheaper than $2500 to fix frozen-pipe damages!

Hiring a lawyer sounds expensive, but it is way cheaper than hiring a amateur (in this case yourself) who costs you money and provides no results (and then you need to hire a professional anyway).My personal philosophy is to "do it right, or do it twice" and its way cheaper to do it right once. 

They perhaps can build cheaper than you can, finance cheaper, operate cheaper and to get it leased up, offer things like 1-2-3 months free rent. 

Those are probably cheaper than hard money anyway. 

I suspect that is due the psychological aspect in the appearance of it being cheaper in rent, because it's all in the same  area/complex. 

Real estate is not the stock market and it's called buy & hold and not buy & sell for a reason.I did sell a few properties about 10 years ago when I learned the hard way that going into cheaper neighborhoods was not the right strategy for me, so that was basically a strategy correction and it was necessary, but also costly both in terms of dollars and time.

You can surely buy cheaper properties and obtain the same debt pay-down, but now you've got 5x the head-ache, so right asset class is more about efficiency when it comes to debt pay-down.Tax shielding is similar concept in that more expensive properties directionally give you more building basis to depreciate, which means less net income to tax.

If you can't then you can look at some cheaper midwest markets like what Ohio has to offer.

Can you move to a cheaper part of the country and house hack?