Well, that pretty neatly eliminates the college town, then.
Those triple property taxes
@$250/mo (plus $300/year for the school thing?) are going to be a serious hit on making money in your family town, though.
Remember that the 1% rule is only a blunt instrument - there are 1% places where you'll immediately lose your shirt (high property taxes is usually the reason - some places in the mid-Atlantic often are nearly worthless/impossible to sell because nobody wants to pay the taxes to own them) and there are <1% rule places that will be great. You need to run the numbers for each property.
Assuming you are financing the purchase and putting down 25%, for example:
P&I on $90k loan @4.5% (no sure if you can get that for non-occupied right now, though): $456
Taxes: $300/month
Insurance: $100/month (this varies a TON depending on where you live)
Management: at least $100/mo, and even if you're doing it yourself you should include this.
Vacancy: $100/mo
Capex/Maintenance: depends on the property but I'd budget $200-300/mo.
We're already at over $1200 (using conservative numbers) which sounds like it's the median rent for the kind of property you're looking at. You'll save a little tax money from depreciation but not enough to really get you to profitability.
You can obviously do whatever you want, but I'd avoid either place and invest elsewhere (if you're comfortable with being an offsite landlord) or else just plug money into equities and bonds and REITs if you want some RE exposure.
-W