Yet the increasing seriousness of the Cambridge housing shortage now began to put pressure on Harvard from another quarter: low-income residents of Cambridge and Design School students and Faculty sympathetic to their plight began calling upon Harvard to build more than 150 units of housing on Shady Hill.

In the aftermath of the April crisis, the GSD Expansion Committee made a formal proposal to the University: construct 500 units of housing on Shady Hill, open half of them to lowincome community residents, and finance the construction through state programs and loans from Harvard's endowment.

University officials objected to the GSD proposal on several grounds, but their main concern seemed to be neighborhood reaction to the GSD plan.

The situation was a difficult one. On one hand, the housing shortages were getting worse, yet on the other, neighbors would probably fight to the death-in the City Council, and perhaps even in the courts-against a proposal which would bring lowerincome Cambridge residents into the neighborhood around Shady Hill. Caught in the middle, Edward S. Gruson, Pusey's new assistant for Community Affairs, and other Harvard planning officials took the srinplest course: they split the difference between the 150 units Harvard was going to build and the 500 units the GSD asked, and began to develop plans for 300 units of housing for University personnel.

As the plans now stand, Harvard will build two 17-to 20-story towers containing a total of 280 housing units. Another 20 units will be built in lowrise, town house sections. The cost of the entire project is estimated at roughly $8 to $10 million.

Predictably enough, neither the neighbors nor the group of GSD activists regard the Harvard plans as final; both groups are continuing efforts to bring the project closer to their respective ideas for Shady Hill.

In recent months, the neighbors have been the more active of the two groups. Over the summer, they began informal conversations with Gruson and other University officials; two weeks ago, some 50 residents of the area formally organized themselves into the Norton Woods Neighborhood Association for action on the Shady Hill project.

This association's membership is, to say the least, distinguished. Among those present at the organization meeting were critic Howard Mumford Jones, French Chef Julia Child, Mrs. John Kenneth Galbraith, Reginald H. Phelps '30, director of University Extension, and Edward T. Wilcox, director of General Education. All of them live within a block or two of the Shady Hill site.

The sentiment of the meeting was clear on two points: most of those present were willing to accept some housing on Shady Hill, but aimost none wanted to see as much as 300 units there. "We should realize that the Sachs Estate has stayed empty for about as long as it's going to in a city like Cambridge which is so short of land," one man said, while another commented, "I think 300 units is out of sight as far as mobs of people are concerned."

Mobs of people, traffic, strain on City services-those were some of the objections the group voiced to the Shady Hill plans. But perhaps the underlying cause of discontent was the feeling that 300 units of housing simply wouldn't fit, that a development of this size would ruin what some called the aesthetic and historical character of the neighborhood. As Jones put it, to visualize the size of the project, "you would have to picture two buildings the size of William James Hall surrounded by smaller buildings."

This picture did not please most of the audience; they promptly named an executive committee, and directed it to develop a counter-proposal for presentation to Harvard. Though no proposal has yet been officially presented, it seems likely that it will ask that no more than 150 units (the number suggested in earlier informal meetings) be built on the lot.

While the Norton Woods Neighborhood Association seems ready to accept some development- -but less than 300 units-on Shady Hill, two other factions are at least potentially ready to form in the area:

A small group of residents, mostly of the portion of Somerville lying adjacent to Shady Hill, would like the entire area preserved as a park. "This is the last chance to get some kind of decency around here. You ought to see the poor parks we have in Somerville," says Mrs. Joan Sullivan, leader of this group.

Some residents of the area may support a denser development than Harvard is planning. Last spring, the GSD activists collected some 50 signatures in the neighborhood on a petition supporting their plan to build 500 units on Shady Hill. Now they are planning surveys in Cambridge and Somerville-and later this year, a studio course at the school-in order to develop a plan for denser development which could get neighborhood backing.

But these two groups are not yet organized, if they ever will be. At least for the moment, the active debate over Shady Hill is mostly between the University and the Norton Woods Association.