At a December meeting of the Agassiz Neighborhood Council (ANC), activist William Bloomstein acknowledged that the neighborhood was in a historic position.

“This is the largest construction Harvard’s ever going to do in the City of Cambridge,” he said. “They’re going to basically take this entire area and blow it up.”

Bloomstein is a member of ACID—the Agassiz Committee on the Impacts of Development—which residents formed last year, according to the group’s mission statement, in the face of “2, 5, 10, 15 years of relentless excavation, construction and vibrations.”

Bloomstein told residents they could seek a building moratorium from the City Council, which would effectively halt development projects in the area—a tactic the Riverside neighbors had successfully used to block the building of the art museum. Last June, in an informal straw poll, ANC members voted 24-1, with two abstentions, in favor of seeking a moratorium.

But rather than fight the traditional street-by-street battle, residents and Harvard officials took to the negotiating table.

University representatives, city officials and neighborhood activists formed a working group to hash out a compromise. And at the December ANC meeting, the residents voted unanimously, with Bloomstein’s encouragement, to support negotiations.

ACID conducted a survey to gauge Agassiz’s priorities, and used it to create a “wish list” of concessions they hoped to receive from the University, including over a million dollars to support neighborhood programs and a cap on building heights.

Joel Bard, a member of ACID, says the group recognized that Harvard could legally build on its own property within the campus, but saw an opportunity to work with the University and get some benefits out of the deal.

“It’s been clear that Harvard was going to build something and had the right,” Bard says. “What we’re negotiating about is what they’re going to build and under what circumstances.”

In March, ANC members voted to take two items off the wish list that they considered the most difficult to obtain, saying they hoped to speed the negotiations along. They agreed not to place a limit on the size and density of building projects.

They also removed the demand that the popular Peabody Museum remain in the neighborhood, since University officials had indicated that they wanted flexibility to consider moving the museum to Allston in the future.

The discussions have been productive, Harvard officials and ACID members say, although neither side is offering any promises.

“I think everyone agrees it’s amicable,” Stone says. “They have been thoughtful about engaging in things that are possible. We have as well.”

Bard says the neighbors feel they have been treated fairly, and calls the dialogue “frank and open.” But he emphasizes that he hopes Harvard will realize the concerns about development are “issues of survival.”

“We’re hoping they’re going to take the neighborhood’s good faith bargaining position to heart and really meet us more than partway on a lot of very reasonable requests,” he says.