I make much more than that at my day job to cover that bad news scenario, plus have other short term financing to cycle that in the extraordinarily rare case I would actually need to.  

You bet they would and the cycle repeats.  

I know this is the million dollar question and nobody has a crystal ball but for anyone who has been around for at least one entire market cycle, maybe what is going on looks familiar?

This is typical late in the cycle.

I will surely expect a down cycle in the future but our rents are not overly inflated so as buy-and-hold investor, I have less to worry about.

Some take longer than others to adopt their parents' / grandparents' priorities, but at some point the bloom starts to fall off the rose of being "trendy' and you settle into the lifestyle and patterns that have been with us since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.I'm mid-40s now, so I've seen my own generation and the millennials both pass thru these cycles, although Xers (me!)

Is there any functional difference aside from freeze/thaw cycles between the two?

I am actually mildly optimistic for the future of baltimoreEverything runs in cycles, Baltimore is at a low point and the only place to go is up.

It's cycle as you know, it's going to continue to go up and during down turn it will correct itself and and start another up trend after that. 

I personally prefer the accredited offerings because the nonaccredited ones usually don't match my personal criteria (i.e. they have too little skin the game, the sponsors don't have full real estate cycle experience, LTV's are too high, have floating-rate debt, fees and promotes are uncompetitive, etc).Having said that, Blackstone has the largest nonaccredited investor offering in the industry (BREIT) and a smaller but similar one is from Starwood (SREIT).