I wish you well with your duplexes. I hope you can get, and keep decent tenants. My brother died in 1995. He and his family owned a home in Rochester, New York. It was the neighborhood we’d grown up in, but by that time, the area was going downhill fast. Not long after my brother’s death, my sister-in-law’s mother passed, and she had the opportunity to move into her family home in Ontario, New York. I told her to jump on it, because if she stayed in the city too long, she’d get too old to want to move at all. She held on to the home in the city because there was no mortgage, and fixed it up to rent it. I told her she was nuts to rent the place out, especially in that area, but she did it anyway. The first and only time she rented the house, she got burnt. The woman (black) totally destroyed the place, and did it, in a very short time. My sister-in-law ended up having to evict the woman, and went through small-claims court in order to get damages. It took a very long time, but she did eventually get some of her money back. When my niece married, my sister-in-law turned the house over to her. She and her husband lived in it for while, fixed it up, then managed to find a decent couple in the same neighborhood who wanted to buy the house, while they held on to the mortgage. In the end, it worked out well for both sides.
I moved out of inner city Rochester in 1994 and became a defacto landlord. I rented out two houses in Rochester. At the time, I worked for the corrupt Rochester Housing Authority. They hated landlords and came after me for a trumped up “conflict of interest” which didn’t exist. I had the full force of the govt lawyering up against me as a single divorced mom.
It was a microcosm of what President had been experiencing so I completely sympathize. I left that job and had to change careers to IT.
The RHA bankrupted me by blackballing me from future employment and having me run up legal fees to defend myself as they had one of their tenants in my building and riding to pay me her subsidized rent. They caused me to lose the rentals but we’ve gotten back into the business recently as hubby’s contractor skills are put to good use.