I looked into this at more than one occasion, because Milwaukee has such an old housing stock, everything is 60-120 years old.Most of the new apartments we see are 4 and 5 star developments with very high rents, this allows to offset the high cost of construction a little better.

It might cause me financial harm as I have to sell more stocks and might pay short term capital gains vs long term capital gains.

With the money from my savings and stocks I have about 100k . 

When the housing market became seller friendly, I unloaded 5/6 of our long term rental units, paid off our house with that and invested in stocks and mutual funds…completely no fun, right??

Or should I just put them into stock market?

She has some stock (maybe 50k), some retirement IRA of around 100k which I believe she has started to take and then maybe 20k in her savings account.

Say it is invested in a stock portfolio - now it is investment interest expense. 

If not, should I sell stock that I have that has capital gains that would be due on it and offset that?

As for stock manipulation, yeah, I feel sorry for the fool who tries nerfing a banks stock via the measure noted.

You might check with your Self-Directed IRA Trust Company/Custodian, they might have a brokerage connection capability where you can setup a brokerage account tied to your IRA, then you can with that brokerage to invest in various public market investments, in some cases stocks, mutual funds, ETF's, treasuries, and CD's.