All the suggestions above are good, but that's not why you had a dramatic increase suddenly.Get to know your water meter. 

This creates two challenges for me:1) I'd like to do moderate to significant renovations on the units, and my business partner plans on owner-occupying one of the units, so we would need to permanently vacate one or, depending on the property, even all of the units. 2) In order to make the numbers work I'd need to dramatically increase rents (by several hundred dollars/month) to bring them up to market levels. 

The worst part is that I can't tell what the local politicos are doing about it, apart from each party blaming the other party for inadequate responses.Although Milwaukee is a short 80 miles north of Chicago, the two cities are dramatically different.

While only a little over one month in, I have seen dramatic improvements in my daily life. 

It doesn't sound exciting to say you work for a major corporation but your chances of long-term wealth dramatically go up when working within these corporations. 

Given we will be living in one of the units, we won’t be collecting rent from that unit and as a result, our return is cut dramatically.

It’s admirable to homeschool the kids and stay at home with them but If you are only going to have one employed adult they need to increase the household income dramatically especially for where you live .

I dramatically underestimated the cost involved in "not owning enough tools". 

Many of these areas change dramatically block by block so its hard to assume every street in a certain neighborhood if bad.  

Rents have gone up dramatically the past five years, and have gone up over 5% in our market over the last year alone.