Get ready to learn as much as you can about landlording and human behavior!

Density developers often spend a decade getting approvals for projects.  30 years of past behavior results in chronic housing shortage and a disappearing of affordable housing stock that continually gets renovated to supply wealthier residents.As for clean energy, California built suburban style cities that rely on automobiles. 

Learning to respect money, living within your means (it's really a sexy thing to do), and showing fiscal self-control are behaviors/commitments that extremely wealthy people employ. 

Usually you want to incentivice behavior and pay for risk. 

Observe their behavior and what they say.

The guy you talked to was probably more of a bird dog than a wholesaler.

If they can figure a way out of it (and its possible), good for them but I no longer have a dog in the fight. 

He was open about having a dog, only smoking outside, etc..

That way, you could do the garage idea.Or turn it into a "free" neighborhood dog park.

It's the single biggest failure point for so many investors, in my opinion, because  without it we're just dogs chasing our tail.