One simple change is to upzone areas that aren't poor too. That will lower the price of housing everywhere, which is good. In most US cities, rich neighborhoods

One simple change is to upzone areas that aren't poor too. That will lower the price of housing everywhere, which is good. In most US cities, rich neighborhoods buy their way out of upzoning. For example the area around Dewey Blvd and the Forest Hill MUNI station has excellent transit access (subway in walking distance!) and there are a few km of street frontage without too much pitch for walkability but it's all SFH on relatively large lots by SF standards with commercial confined to a tiny strip mall. Why? Owners are rich! See also: Peskin ratfucking the North Beach central subway station. However, this isn't a complete solution because it's not just a side-effect to have mid-to-high income people moving in to a lower-income area; it's intended. Concentrated poverty leads to weaker education and healthcare systems and other social disorders that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Making those areas mixed-income is something social planners dreamed up as a way to increase access to jobs and improve schools etc. Mixed-income environments have a good track record where they occur naturally, so we've tried to replicate that success. You've got to deal with the business sector. Analyses that look at housing prices and incomes alone inevitably find that housing price increases don't exceed the benefits of new job availability. But what also happens is that everything else in the community becomes more expensive. Cheap restaurants close, expensive ones open, survivors raise their prices; the same thing happens to grocers, bars, theatres, hairdressers etc. This is the big unsolved problem in "investing in poor communities": even in places with rent control (like SF), this kind of gentrification can price people out. But do note, however, that the problem described in the first paragraph exacerbates the one in the third paragraph by increasing the mean income of people who move into poor communities and thus increasing the disparity in the price point of services in demand in those areas.