It's very hard to acquire those skill sets if you need to choose between having enough money to pay the bills, and spending time and money on acquiring those skills. Or alternatively, it's a lot easier to attract people with those skills into your community if you have the money to pay them for their skills.
My point remains, I think you'd see people in blighted areas sink a lot more of their resources into community improvement if the opportunity cost of doing so weren't as cripplingly high as it is now.
Most companies don't have incentives to care about the communities their employees are from, or the skills to help. It's not deemed productive or efficient in current corporate interests to use corporate wealth to ensure their employees have healthy home lives in healthy communities. (Shareholders, C-Suite, board members most companies certainly care enough about their home lives/communities right now, but outside of the investor class there's very little financial empathy and little incentive to have empathy because that stuff doesn't necessarily show up on a quarterly report.)
It would also move money back into these economies in a way that support some of the kinds of industrial district revitalization that you see in more urban areas nowadays.
All in all, the capitalist in me wants to say that you'll get better results if you just give people money and let them figure out how to dispose of it, rather than letting some government bureaucrat off in the state capital or wherever try to figure out how best to use the money. The latter option is worryingly similar to the root causes of the worst of the prosperity-destroying waste that went on in places like the Soviet Union. And I do think you'll see people (mostly) put the money they'd get from a basic income to good use. It's not like anyone enjoys living in a blighted town; it's just that they're living under economic conditions that leave them with little other choice, aside from maybe doing like I did and contributing to the blight by moving out of town.