Having them as a tenant in 75% of the space is great, but if they can't lease the balance of the space, obviously, cash flow will suffer. 

From there I would look into establishing an operating company which can carry out the high liability activities involved in your investments (rent collection, hiring contractors, property management, etc,) these are sometimes called shell companies - they are generally the companies law suits get filed against, but wont actually own any property so you only sloe the liquid assets that are in them in the case of a law suit.Through the use of land trusts you can place the properties into the Series LLC without having to deal with the foreign filing fees.

And these class-D neighborhoods only suffer in economic downturns.

Hey man I'm a new investor as well and something that I've heard from multiple sources is to only tell your tenants that you're the new property manager (assuming you wont be outsourcing this) and not to disclose that you're the owner.

Going the BRRRR route, the ROI wont be much starting off and I fear that the $60k I have for making this thing go will run out faster, although the equity potential long run may be better.I have done some work on my own home and am pleased with the results and I am not afraid to do more, but I also dont want it to take forever.   

OK to leave some money locked up but I would estimate that the appraisal wont come in over $375K from what I can determine.

Can I still qualify for owner-occupied financing even though I wont be living there for several months?

Since you only rented it for 9 months the depreciation probably wont kill you but you're only going to get around 2/3s of the gain tax free when you sell.  

Landlords do not spend money if they can not increase rents to cover the costs, new construction is stifled and over all the tenants suffer under rent controls.

For example there are many "cheap" 8+ unit buildings that some commercial firms wont bother with.