At any rate, lease-options can be a good way to get your foot in the door with some landlording and creative financing experience without much overhead risk.

i don't have a list for you but i can tell you what i look for as a home inspector. first, look at the ridge line on the roof. if there is a bow or a dip in the roof line, there are structural issues. run the other way. look for cracks in the foundation walls. some cracks are normal, but any large cracks with a matching crack on the opposite side of the foundation, is a structural issue. put a level, preferably a 4 foot level, on the outside walls of the house, vertically. move the level in or outward until it shows level. if the house is tilting in any direction, this will show you. a tilting house is not a good thing. look for windows or doors that have cracks above or below them in the walls, usually a diaginal crack. this indicates a house that is settling. all houses settle a little, but these are extreme. next, open and close a few doors and windows. when a house settles or has structural issues, windows and doors won't work the same.

I contacted the listing agent for a freshly remodeled, 1700 square foot house in Miller Beach, about 4 blocks away from Lake Michigan, and the listing agent told me I could only get $650/month. 

It's located on a main road with high traffic (vehicle and foot) and community ties.  

There are no shortcuts (like "$5000 chunks" or cost per square foot), regardless of what people may tell you.The only shortcut is lots of practice and doing lots of projects on the same types of houses in the same location using the same contractors.When I first started, it would take me hours of putting together a scope of work, hours of talking to contractors and hours of walking the aisles at the big box stores. 

A year ago I was out working on my yard and he stopped by to chat briefly and during this chat he mentioned that his wife was looking into the official property lines and he said, the fence that divides our property in the front yard is actually 2.5 feet on his land at least in this 15 foot long section.  

Another point is excess land, when you meet the building requirements for a residential home, say a quarter acre, if your lot is a 1/3 acre, the excess is not valued at the same rate per foot as the first 1/4 acre.

I am interested in a property in Southern California that is at the foot of the mountain.

Not sure about Michigan specifically, but yes, you do need an end-buyer to wholesale these via double closing which implies you need a robust buyers list.  

And there aren't enough to go around (a deficit of some 3 million units by one economist's count).I completely agree with you that multi-family new construction may be a big opportunity for the foreseeable future, and we may gradually see the detached single family home lose some footing as the icon of the American dream.I never said "build more single family homes" (though admittedly that may have been the gist of one of the articles I referenced).