Oakland, for decades home to some of the region’s lowest-income households, is now fighting to make sure the city doesn’t get so swanky that it slams the door on the poor.

The plan from Mayor Libby Schaaf is risky and might not work. It might backfire in the city’s face, but it’s a bold effort — and the right thing to do.

Schaaf is proposing building 17,000 housing units — both affordable and market rate — and then protecting another 17,000 units for tenants who are being squeezed out of the housing market.

In a way, the mayor hopes to build and expand on the housing model that former mayor, now-Gov. Jerry Brown used to kick-start downtown Oakland nearly two decades ago. His plan attracted 10,000 new tenants into market-rate housing in the city’s downtown and now teeming Uptown District. That laid the foundation for the city’s economic growth.

A flurry of new legislation and local laws would be needed to protect residents who stand to lose their housing. Schaaf says her plan is not radical, but one that largely relies on stepping up enforcement of rent protection laws already on the books.

“This set of strategies looks less at regulations and controls and more at building new housing and converting existing housing into protected affordable housing,” Schaaf said.

“It’s not going to change the landscape in a radical way, but provide enforcement and close loopholes in existing laws and generate resources so that we can house the people who come to our city.”

The revenue engine of the plan, which Schaaf projected will collect $60 million for affordable housing over the next eight years, will include fees paid by developers.

City officials are pondering a rent stabilization fee increase from $35 to $110 per unit to administer landlord-tenant dispute hearings and education programs and a geographically tiered fee structure for developers that will reach $24,000 per unit over the next two years.

The mayor may cast her plan as a minor policy tweak, but altogether it’s clearly a major overhaul in city policy.

Schaaf’s plan is politically astute, but potentially risky.

It’s smart politically because it embraces the desires and designs of the next generation of voters in one of the most activist cities in the nation. At 50, Schaaf has hitched her wagon to the political ideology of Gen-Xers and Millennials. From her mayoral Art Car to her transportation plan to this housing plan, she may not be trying to join the activist crowd — but she’s sure trying to co-opt them.

Maybe it’s a coincidence that the tenant organization Just Cause announced its drive to place an initiative on the November ballot to put a 5 percent cap on annual rent increases now at 10 percent. If so, the timing is sublime.

Schaaf’s approach is risky, too, because it bucks aging Baby Boomers who own the lion’s share of the houses, apartment buildings and businesses in this city, who vote in large numbers and who are about to get smacked upside the head with some big fee increases.

The cost of doing business in Oakland is going up, and Schaaf is counting on a robust housing market with such lopsided demand that it can withstand even an economic market slowdown. Her plan also assumes the development community will absorb additional fees and make alterations on the fly without affecting the pace and planning of future construction.

But more than anything else, Schaaf is counting on the hearts and minds of Oakland’s resident-activist community to embrace the opportunity to provide assistance to everyday people instead of coming up with new planning instruments to keep them out.

I support it knowing that without some good fortune of my own, I’d be one of the people seeking asylum from the Bay Area housing market.

Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column runs on Tuesday and Friday. Email: chjohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @chjohnson