In some places, prices are too high for rental property investing to make sense. C'est la vie. Invest elsewhere or in some other type(s) of asset. I won't go into detail on the 1% rule here, but you can easily google it (or read some other threads here) and educate yourself. Long story short, there are a lot of things about rentals that will end up costing you money - vacancy, repairs, tenant problems/lawsuits/etc, management... on and on. So serious investors won't generally touch a SFH under 1%.
If the shoe factory in my town is awful and loses money, I invest in a different business, or a shoe factory somewhere else, right? I have never understood why people don't think this way about real estate.
-W