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 ...

So what, exactly, is the plan?

President Obama’s plan would require households making more than $1 million annually — and the president is one of them — to pay a certain minimum percentage in taxes that matches the rate at which middle-class households are taxed. (Think of it as a simpler version of the overly complicated alternative minimum tax, which was enacted to ensure that even with their many deductions, rich taxpayers still paid a minimum percentage in income taxes.)

Are there any more details?

Nope. The White House has left it quite vague. In fact, it’s unclear how serious the proposal is at this stage.

The president hasn’t yet specified at what rate the millionaires should be taxed. And as the New York Times puts it, administration officials have said that the plan is more of a guiding principle for negotiations. Indeed, they haven’t included its potential ...