Isn't the article describing the classic Gentrification move?
Key quotes:
"It's wealth that is shared throughout the neighborhood." -- about as anti-gentrification as you can get.
"American cities can make low risk, high returning investments while improving the quality of life for people, particularly those who have not benefited from the current approach." -- indicates to me that the investment he's speaking of is of cities into existing areas, not developers demolishing and recreating neighborhoods.
The trick would be to apply the improvements to every poor neighborhood at the same time so you don't create winners and losers and upset the balance in the housing market, but this is basically impossible.
The difference I see here is that the developers and new residents are the ones who reap the benefits of the increased property values from gentrification, whereas if the city makes modest improvements before it's current residents are forced out by increasing prices/taxes, then the current residents reap the increased value. Even if they move because they don't want to pay taxes on higher property values, their property is still worth more when they sell it.
No, the current homeowners reap that value. Many residents are renters, particularly in low-income areas, while the owner often doesn't live anywhere near the place.
Typically with gentrification it isn't a series of small improvements that change the neighborhood its bigger urban planning changes or additional big projects.
Even if you could do that, it wouldn't work. It would simply make all of the poor neighborhoods more attractive to gentrifiers at the same time.
I think there is a tipping point where if you help poor neighborhoods too much, they become attractive enough as places to live that the poor residents end up being displaced by increased housing costs. It's an unintended consequence.
So if you increase the quality of all of the affordable housing, then it shouldn't make much impact on the prices of those houses. They're already paying what they can. Now if you create new job opportunities at the same time then the equation changes. If the high quality jobs greatly outgrow the housing then you end up in a situation like San Fransisco or lower Manhattan where rents skyrocket regardless of the condition of the housing.
Consider what is happening in some of the rougher parts of downtown San Jose: people are moving in to the existing houses and either renovating them or living in them as-is. Few developers are involved in most of these areas so far -- they are simply the last remaining "affordable" areas in the city, but not for long. Home values in those neighborhoods have appreciated about $100k per house over the past several years.
This is also going to happen in Oakland, and it is probably happening already in some neighborhoods.
The bottom line is that gentrification does not have to be driven by developers. When demand far outstrips supply as it does in the Bay Area today, the wealthy end up in direct competition with the poor over the same housing, and the wealthy will simply outbid the poor.