I bought my first property (a 1/1 condo in LB) at the height of the market in 2008 and ended up turning it into a vacation rental out of sheer necessity.

This tenant will also likely stay longer out of necessity assuming you're not too aggressive on rental increases.

I feel like those are the unspoken necessities, they aren't talked about a lot, but if you learn those, you can do stuff on the side and get a lot of $$$$!   

Patience is a necessity not a virtue.

Banks have led a great many people to believe that the mortgage mess exists because too many loans were given at or around 100% LTV.

That is hogwash spread by banks because the...

So while you may spend more than someone with a lower income, a poor person spends, by necessity a larger percentage of their income on sales taxed goods than you do.

Also is sewer backup coverage a necessity?

You talk about the necessity of tenant consistency without acknowledging your own.  

Write a letter to YOUR tenant and the OWNER of the nearby condo, explaining the necessity of cooperation. 

However, if you are able to use the high cost of living to your advantage, as you can as a RE investor there and other ways as well, you can turn that frown upside down ... on the financial side, the trick for me was to arrange my financial affairs such that the higher the cost of living gets, the wealthier I get, but I will still be ok and wealthy if that doesn't happy ... then my happiness is only limited by the 405 freeway (joke, not really), which I only need to use if I want to leave the 6th happiest city, which would almost always be by choice and not necessity, again by design :) So, I guess my point is that you can engineer your lifestyle for maximum happiness no matter where you live, and that is a worthy metric to optimize around, but some places are definitely easier to do that than others due to the nice things you can't change IMO.How is Alaska treating you?