I see 2 options for you:1) Push to get the loans paid down (increase salary, decrease expenses, time to pay down) to improve your personal debt to income ratio2) Look at larger properties (commercial loans) where the lending criteria is based more on the property than on your personal numbers.

Right now I have to recalculate the numbers, because not only did we fill some vacancies, but the expenses decreased as well, which brought up the NOI even more.

In the course of one year a house typically won't increase or decrease materially.

It appears to me that your partner believes that the rehab budget should only be $20k--I don't believe he sees the same value for expenditures beyond that level or he wouldn't propose to decrease his contribution beyond that. 

Generally your rents increase and problems decrease the further west and north you go.  

Sanders will increase gov't spending in a depression, he's Keynesian.Clinton will decrease public spending in a depression, she's a neo-liberal.Trump, who knows.

We have been successful in adding value to these units, decreasing expenses and increasing cash flow.  

The comps over the last 4 years have seen property in this particular community of 500 condos decrease by about 15% as newer, bigger construction goes up all around.

I tend to only look at this stuff at tax time and promptly forget it in between, but if memory serves, if you make $100k or less, you can use $25k in passive losses to offset active income, with that amount decreasing to zero at $150k. 

You will have to increase rents and decrease expenses somehow and very often this could mean doing some kind of renovation work to add separate metering for certain utilities. 3.