The houses in my area are affordable, but everything in this price range ($0-$20K) is in poor condition and located in depressed parts of the city.

Feel free to contact me if I can be of help.As far as lower priced properties, the Muskegon Market is still quite depressed in some areas and can return very nice profits.  

From what he told me, "the tenant moves in, pay rent for 3 months, dont pay for 3 months, gets evicted and leaves $2000 in damage"..He sounds so depressed that I don't want to drill, even though I was very curious.... ugh....

Other profit centers (mortgage paydown, appreciation which may be negative in your case, cash flow over the full life, and tax benefits) ... project them all out using long term average historic appreciation rates (CAGR over decades spanning multiple RE cycles, for both rents and prices) for that hood and compute IRR ... this will give you a much more complete and realistic picture of how the investment is most likely to perform.This is the analytical framework for how to assess the financials ... the important underlying question though is why are prices so depressed and not keeping up with inflation?

I'm 21 years old, and am full heatedly wanting to become an investor to leave my software job that I'm depressed at.

If the area is instead depressed then most tenants will not be a great selection and no matter how nice you make the property it will get trashed again.

I know this is going to create a lot of jobs in a relatively depressed area.

The best I've been able to deduce is that the dip there has finally ended and the city (at least around Cleveland) is getting its act together to attract more business.My best guess is that, unless something else happens, the market there is SO depressed it can't go much of anywhere but up.

The area I'm looking in is somewhat economically depressed - on it's way up, but slowly, so lots of slow-pay tenants on top of it.If I was looking at buildings in a better neighborhood, and not looking to self-manage, it would be a different story...

If you are a flipper, or believe your SFR market is depressed, and has reason to believe it will rebound where you will have capital appreciation, then the cash flow matters less.