Yes, it's sort of a de-facto alliance: conservative property owners and clueless braindead slacktivists. Remove the slactivists and their flimsy environmental arguments from the equation and the purely greed-driven NIMBYism of the property owners will become much harder to defend/justify.

Living on the street where this took place (albeit over 50 blocks away), this is definitely not the case in Oakland. New housing generally replaces really poorly constructed old housing that has fallen into dilapidation.

"Improving" the houses in a neighborhood almost always increases the value of other houses in the area.

Whether this creates a class disadvantage through displacement or a reduction of affordable housing is another issue, but blaming conservative property owners is not an accurate motivation. The transfer taxes[1] on housing turnover supplied a great portion of Oakland's revenue during the bubble. Given that Oakland has a weak retail (and therefore, sales tax) market, it really needs real estate to pick up.

[1] http://www.acgov.org/auditor/clerk/transfertax.htm