I even physically moved to safeguard my family and home. 

A chiropractor, physician, and physical therapist rent the space.

Hey @Mark Albini , only have a couple physical copies, but I picked up some BP audiobooks for as little as $5 on their black friday sale and have found even more at my local library.

If you're going to physically block traffic, you very probably will need some kind of permit from your jurisdiction, probably the city or borough or whatever they call it there.There are little "Slow: Children Playing" signs, complete with a little flag, that you can buy.

Just because it's physically the same building doesn't matter.

As far as the purchase itself, from a buyer side perspective be prepared that even an approved short sale will still take a little while to get re-approved for a new buyer, so you'll have to exercise some patience.

If it comes time to sell a physical property, I want to have accumulated as little passive loss as possible to avoid trapping the loss in a 1031 exchange.To give a concrete example, if I buy a 200,000 house with a land value of 40,000, I depreciate 5,818 per year (assume cash flow is small due to buying the house with a mortgage).

I feel like being physically present for my first investment is very important.

If you do leave your home town you might not be able to exercise your RE license outside of the NY state. 

Sounds like a great learning experience, as well as practice exercising that risk muscle.