The story of the Sawmill neighborhood, one of the oldest Latino neighborhoods in Albuquerque, is a familiar one. Sawmill was, for a long time, among the city’s most affordable places to live. But it is also within walking distance of the downtown business district and adjacent to the historic Old Town area, a major New Mexico tourist attraction. In the early 1990s, a wave of property investment swept through Sawmill, which included development of a huge retail plaza, luxury condominiums, and a hotel convention complex. Businesses appeared on residential blocks once lined with affordable, single-family houses. This economic activity caused real estate values throughout the Sawmill neighborhood to spiral upward, pushing land and housing costs beyond the reach of families who had lived there for decades.

Here’s where the story takes a different direction. Members of the Sawmill Advisory Council (SAC), a group of neighborhood residents formed 10 years earlier to stop pollution from a nearby particle board factory, decided they needed to do more than ...