(which happens to be one of the more expensive cities in Los Angeles County) Perhaps I should invest someplace completely different for house hacking.. essentially taking the route of delayed gratification with the goal in mind to someday be able to comfortably move back to L.A. in the coming years.

The response to your post by the quality of posters that followed should bring you amazing comfort and gratification that your strategy is absolutely solid.

What I do is delayed gratification as I buy a POS (some worse than others - some need little work and others, a lot of work), fix it up, and when the place is decent, that's when the money comes, and it's inflated as the rents are higher since the property is nicer.

It should be a day of accomplishment, gratification and celebration. 

Understand delayed gratification and understand not letting people know.

The "leverage" aspect of it may come from targetting (in your property selection process) the highest possible upside (instant gratification) that is not balanced against cash flow.3) That for a given BRRRR property there is a cash flow/refinance-to-high-appraisal trade-off is more trivial.

The government run healthcare system will be like every other government program, overpriced and impossible to access.We are already paying billions of dollars in California in medical expenses for released convicts (because we can't afford to keep them in prison and 40,000 were released), sexual predators, drug addicts, alcoholics, etc.

Having a HUD voucher may be  a tie breaker with similar applicants but is not a shoe in by any means.This is what we put on our application, for another example:Our Criteria:We do not deny housing for race, color, religion, sex, national origin, handicap, sexual orientation, marital status, or familial status.We do deny housing to individuals: when the application is not complete or accurate where there is not sufficient income/resources to pay rent and livewhere there is poor prior tenancy: evictions, violations, damage to rental property, poorly handled move outs, amounts are still owing to landlords or utilities.Criminal activity is at our discretion depending on severity, number of convictions, and how long ago.We do not go into much detail, especially since we don't charge for screening, but it gives them an idea and meets state requirements.

In that case one could argue that you're discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, and should treat those persons the same as those with honorable discharges. 

quite a bit of people starting out seem to want the instant gratification of $100-$200/month initially than start off negative and be thinking 5, 10, 15, 20 + years out.