Just encouraging you to explore how you approach this business.  

Lack of professional business approach will cost a landlord every time. 

Can anybody offer advice and/or recommend a good design/build company who would be familiar with this zoning code, not the most fancy expensive outfit but somebody capable and certainly not the cheapest?

Here is a quick and simple way to approach it.

I do my best not to mix personal with business, that said, no one on my side of the family really has any money and I didn't even want to approach my wife's family until I had a proven business model that I was successfully executing.

HML facilities are pretty cut and dry.but the borrowing against our notes was when I was in the Land and Timber business.. we would log a track  sell it to a home owner on contract but it would take a year or two for them to go through planning get their house designed etc.. and then when construction loan was ready we would get taken out.Generally when we did these the logs paid for the dirt so we owned the property free and clear and would sell the parcels for 150 to 300k ( our profit)  but could not run our machine collecting 2k a month in a payment so we would borrow 50% against them at our bank still positive cash flow and had the money to buy another timber track.. as these were generally all cash purchases..I suppose those that do the brrr with owner financing could run the same model.. ???

I'm very deliberate in my approach.

For the last 6 months I've been self employed with my online company.I finally have some real money and I really, REALLY want to finally pull the god damn trigger.I have no friends with real estate and seems like anyone ive approached locally doesn't want their territory stepped on, only interested in selling their (cash flowing at least) flip. 

A better approach would be for you to put yourself in the shoes of the type of person you would like to help you and think about how you might make them interested in doing so. 

Using equity from my primary residence and then the 2nd mortgage approach will obviously increase my debt.