I want to know how low rents could go if we were to fall into another recession.

The market volatility has been picking up, uncertainty on the political arena is concerning, plus the fact that the housing market in Phoenix has gone up to pre-recession levels.

Riskier markets would be more interesting to me when we're in recession, not as rates are rising and the economy is near full employment. 

The fact that Seattle passed their pre-recession highs of 2008 and went even higher is good, but in future will need to beat this higher bar.

I had my guy quote me on pulling the old, 4 foot fluorescent, light fixture, sheetrocking the ceiling, putting in recessed lighting etc.

DC and NYC are somewhat recession/crash-resilient.

Interestingly according to according to the National Association of REIT (NAREIT) the self-storage asset class also outperformed other sectors in the most recent recession. 

The great recession crash took around half as long to recover as the great depression crash. 

For example, if you look at recession statistics, generally office suffered higher vacancies and higher rental drops than multi family.

Personally, I suspect the time to invest in multi family is behind us for now (wait till next recession) 5 or 6 % cap rates and you have work to do and taxes to pay doesn't sound that interesting when I can get near 5% yields on high yield muni bonds-no taxes and no work.Consider Kitsap county/Bremerton/port orchard for better deals though even there prices have increased meaningfully.