Check out the winter 2018 Fannie Mae report on multi-units in Denver (i.e.: apartment rentals).

I hope to start with a single-family or small multi-family home and work my way up from there. 

Do I have to follow every thread to keep track of it?

All of my multis in Providence are around $1600-1900/year. 

I am concerned about being "over leveraged" even though the lender I am working with says I could do this Multi Family property.

I haven't heard much but I do know it's supposed to track your cash levels in your bank accounts to see how much liquidity you have. 

These tools not only allow for greater tracking performance and accountability, but they lend themselves nicely to sharing with our landlords delivering an unprecedented level of transparency. 

I was currently considering flipping a couple houses first before investing in multi-family, just to build some capital again.

I can only conclude that the people arguing for rent control are simply corporate shills willing to protect multi-billion dollar corporations like the Jewel grocery chain, while hammering much smaller landlords.

This is sort of a rough draft of my plans, I would either like to get a multi-family (nothing bigger than a quadplex) or single family 3beds at least and house hack them for cash flow.