As the most well-endowed faculty the FAS suffers disproportionately from a direct tax on endowments compared to the Business school, which takes revenue from tuition donations and consulting.

Nonetheless, FAS has softened its previously contentious stance on the funding because the FAS will benefit as other schools move to Allston and it fills the space they leave. The Central Administration calmed FAS fears that such a funding program would continue indefinitely, promising to reexamine the plan after five years.

The Boston Redevelopment Authority

Harvard agreed last February to design all expansion plans co-operatively with a community planning group and will underwrite the costs for the urban planning consultant who design the North Allston development plans.

The winning bid for consulting the Allston development went to Goody, Clancy and Associates, which was also responsible for the Charles River Basin project. Harvard will cover the planning costs: $200,000 over eighteen months. The bid award hasn’t yet been announced publicly.

“The goal at the end of those eighteen months is a conceptual layout of the new area,” says Director of Community Relations Kevin A. McCluskey ’76.

Goody-Clancy’s bid proposal identifies the main issues in Allston development. It centers around the transformation of Western Avenue, the road between HBS and the proposed academic campus, into a “main street” commercial boulevard for Allston and “a front door to the new Harvard campus.”

David Dixon, the principal consultant for Goody-Clancy, warns that the proposal may change drastically by the end of the process

“We can look at different areas and say ‘this area will be graduate student housing, this area will be academic buildings, this area will be commercial, this area museums, and this area community housing,” McCluskey says.

The greening of Western Ave. began this April with the construction of One Western Ave, an HBS housing project beside the river on the corner of Western Avenue, land Harvard held before the new purchases.

“The question is how it all fits to create a new sense of community,” McCluskey says.

Allston residents developed the neighborhood’s stringent approval measures in the late eighties, and trust they will keep Harvard at bay.

“Harvard’s the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. I know that,” says Chair of the Allston Community Task Force Ray Mellone. “I’m not afraid of anybody talking about concepts, anybody talking about ideas. Harvard may be developing a lot of plans with their school of architecture. It’s their money, it’s their university, it’s their land. But there’s no way anything’s going to be built without going through us.”