There are a ton of helpful people here on BP so you'll have no shortage of opportunities to learn from experienced folks.

This area has a pretty significant housing shortage, so I bet an approach like that would be well received. 

This tells me that there's a critical supply shortage in these "certain places" and the fix is going to have to be more permanent and not just superficial.apparehently, they are seeing rents go up in "certain places 20, 30, 40, 50% and even higher in some places"

3) There's a significant shortage of housing in the USA currently.

The labor and materials shortage has also made the process much harder and profit margins are very slim.

Choosing areas with good infrastructure to significantly increase housing via zoning changes can make a much bigger impact on the housing shortage.  2 units per 1000’ foot of lot size allows larger unit counts that can be built much cheaper than building one small unit at a time.

If you do a search for cheap Class C properties (for example $50,000 to $150,000/$200,000) in the Midwest (pick a random city), ask yourself why there are so many of them with a housing shortage?

Millions upon millions of jobs lost "forever" ("exported" to the "third world"), more millions lost half or more of their retirement accounts, creditors slashed and burned consumer credit to the point where, by the banksters' own numbers, some 74% of Americans wound up with "bad" credit (it was only 47% before they did that), ...Now, add in the knee-jerk responses in the lending industry and you've got a situation where only the elite of formerly middle-class wage earners can even hope to qualify for new home loans.In fact, the given the current housing shortage (yet more fallout from the crash), it is ONLY the dearth of lending which is keeping home prices from launching into interstellar space by suppressing demand.

I don't think it's too unrealistic in the SD market to rent a room for around 1,000 dollars given the shortage of real estate and knowing as a service member myself that the military pays out 1,900 a month for housing allowance.

I cash flow about 250 a month because I'm balancing an escrow shortage.