With chicago having laws that favor the tenants already you lose even more leverage with tenants when you bring the illegal unit piece into. 

I was told that, I should prepare a letter in support of my project and send it to the city office and also speak about it during the public hearing.This is something new for me and I am looking to get some pointers as to what should I highlight in my letter and speech in favor of my project. 

Most of our coastal states are increasing regulations and creating laws that favor tenants, even when the tenant is clearly violating the terms of their lease on purpose.

I favoring taking out more HELOC than cashout the refi.

I have had at least one rental since the 90's and always refused leases in favor of month to month because as it often stated 'leases don't help landlords".

NO WAY in hell I'd ever buy property in Seattle proper due to the tenant friendly city council idiotic dead beat favor laws.

In any event, sometimes just having a good old fashioned conversation with someone can be all it takes. 

@Todd Goedeke great point, but BP favors those asset classes to a certain extent, plus the fact that the requirements for NNN ownership are a little higher from a capital and sophistication point of view limit the number of people who can/want to take that on.

This would go the same for all other items you asked about.Keep in mind that Virginia is a landlord friendly state, it's very friendly to landlords here, tho some courts are less friendly than the next, and bend the laws to suit their personal views, but that's mainly in the larger cities like Richmond where you will see judges rule in an aggressively tenant friendly fashion by imposing rules, such as all notices have to have real ink signature on them, etc.My only real advise is to not mess around with your tenants in a fashion where your raising rents every 30 days or something like that, or adding and removing services randomly because you do or don't want to deal with it.

Going from a taxable income of $1237 to a loss of $4591 would be an income reduction of $5828 resulting in $2039 in tax savings in the current year assuming a 35% tax rate ($2307 at 39.6%).This is a small example, but these numbers scale up and generally become more favorable with larger properties over $500K.