Even Stone acknowledges that one year ago, many residents believed Harvard would not be able to reach an amicable solution in the area.

“But a lot took place in a year,” Stone says.

Under the terms of the agreement approved by the city council, Harvard received permission to build taller buildings than the Carlson petition would have allowed in return for creating a public park on its land and building low-income housing units for city residents. The University plans to construct graduate student housing in Riverside.

“I’m not thrilled by it, but I think Harvard is probably not thrilled by it either,” resident Alec Wysoker ’84 said at the time. “It brings a lot of benefit to the city and the neighborhood.”

In December, the Agassiz neighborhood north of Harvard Yard overwhelmingly approved a separate agreement with Harvard, which will allow the University to construct 1.6 million square feet of space over the next 25 years.

The Agassiz deal gives Harvard the assurance that it will be able to proceed with its expansion of Harvard Law School and the science departments of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). In return, it offers the community a limit on the University’s development in the area, as well as a multimillion-dollar package of benefits ranging from funds for after-school programs to landscaping to traffic improvement measures.

In contrast to the grueling last-minute negotiations in Riverside—where the two sides came together on the last possible day for the city council to act on the neighborhood’s zoning petition—the progress on the agreement in Agassiz was steady over the course of a whole year.

And there is less bad blood between the University and the residents in Agassiz, where community members opted to enter into negotiations from the start, rather than taking Riverside’s more contentious route.

“Traditionally Harvard is the enemy,” says William Bloomstein, one of the four representatives of the Agassiz Committee on the Impacts of Development (ACID) who negotiated the deal with Harvard. “Rather than that approach, we decided to engage Harvard in a collaborative discussion, to understand and to figure out where there were mutual interests that could be met.”

But in this neighborhood, too, the residents have not always been convinced a cooperative relationship with Harvard would be possible. In an informal straw poll conducted at a neighborhood meeting two years ago, residents voted 24-1, with two abstentions, in favor of blocking all Harvard construction in the area.

And even after residents opted to negotiate instead, they did not always see eye-to-eye with the University.

“Those discussions, while less adversarial than the Riverside negotiations, were at times, too, very difficult,” Stone says. “They presented very strong interests that seemed to be different from Harvard’s own interests.”

City Councillor Brian P. Murphy ’86-’87 says in both Agassiz and Riverside, the residents’ first choice would have been for no institutional development to take place at all. But he says the residents realized that if expansion was unavoidable, they wanted to have a say in how it was done.

“In each case people recognized, ‘If change is going to take place, I’d rather be at the table helping to shape that change and to ensure that the community’s concerns are listened to,’” Murphy says.

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