University-Neighborhood Partnership Marked History of Office/Condo Plan

For years, local residents had been complaining that the University didn't take them seriously. "Harvard consistently acts without consulting city officials and residents when it acquires property or designs and plans developments which will have a major impact on the city," the City Council wrote in an angry letter to the Board of Overseers three Januaries ago.

In a few weeks though, final approval is expected for a massive condominium and office development slated for a vacant lot off Mt. Auburn St. The land was purchased by Harvard, and "University Place" was its idea; still, the development has the blessing of local residents, and it bears their stamp as well.

And the most significant thing about the project may not be its size or expense, but the process of cooperation and partnership that marked its formulation. A neighborhood design review team looked at and approved every plan before it became part of the design; the entire community has made small changes and minor shifts in that design.

In short, the University Place project is an entirely new way of doing things for Harvard. The reasons behind it include:

--The effective community pressure on the developers of Parcel 1B, another enormous development planned on a site next to University Place. A coalition of neighborhood groups managed to block construction with one lawsuit after another; it wasn't until the developer of that land agreed to make major concessions that they backed off. "If anything, Parcel 1B was the breakthrough for residents," Thomas Anninger, president of the Neighborhood 10 Association, says. "It gave Harvard and other developers an example showing that a project will come out better with design review collaboration."

--The new leverage city officials gained with the passage of an anti-expansion ordinance that for the first time in 340 years restricts University growth. Under the law, if Harvard wishes to expand in the future it will need the permission of local government; "it will mean the end of business as usual" for the University, councilor David Sullivan predicted before the law passed, and he and others have said since that the timing of Harvard's rapprochement with local residents is not coincidental.

Concern

--The concern common to both University and community that if they couldn't agree on some development plan, some other developer would erect something worse in the future. The leading candidate was Louis DiGiovanni, who sold the land to the University. Harvard used a buy-back agreement with the developer--who once wanted twin 20-story towners on the site--as leverage in their discussions with the community; University officials admitted privately, that they were not happy at the prospect of losing control of the southwest corner of the Square.

Unprecedented as it was, the cooperation nonetheless worked, and fairly quickly. Each side gave something--community residents allowed the plan to be modified in the interest of profitability to include offices, and Harvard designed the project as a buffer between the Square and the neighborhood.

The final exmple of the cooperation came in recent weeks, when some residents decided they weren't quite happy with the deal that had been struck. Instead of hemming and hawing and saying plans couldn't be changed--as the University had in other not-so-distant confrontations with the city--Harvard's planners redrew their design to leave two historic houses standing.