I decided to check growth rates and it was alarming that Dayton Cincy and Columbus were all declining in population.

The neighborhood needs to be stable...not transitional & not declining.  

. :) I'd be shocked if it were the case that in housing, and ONLY in housing, can you suddenly not hook someone up because they are a vet, and decline to give some nice thing to anyone not a veteran.I can deny your application for a "0% down payment, 30 yr fixed, 3.625%" mortgage loan all day long, on the basis that you aren't a veteran ergo I'm not going to offer that product to you.

I must politely decline.  

They declined. 

Note also that the population there has been in slow decline for at least 30 years.Look, I get the appeal of the city (the prices certainly look too good to be true coming from NY or DC), I looked at investing in Baltimore for the same reasons you are, and I live even closer.

Someone recently asked me to invest in a commercial deal, not NNN, but due to my lack of experience I had to decline.

This is done to account for potential market decline in the future.

Anyone with any money moved out of the city as areas began to decline (a few neighborhoods remained where older residents with money held their ground bc they loved their homes).Out of state (and local) slumlords started looking at Ytown as a place to buy disposable properties - buy them cheap, rent to the first crackhead with 500.00 in their pocket, and every few months rinse and repeat bc they got the properties for 15-25k and didn't have to put any real money into them to rent them.

But I don’t invest there, too much risk in fighting the trends of population decline, job loss, business closures, etc.The truth is that when trying to BUILD wealth through real estate investing, cash flow isn’t all that important.