Now that the preliminary report has been released, residents will have a chance to vet the proposals at several community meetings.

The University will have to gather resident input before it files an institutional master plan with the city sometime next year. If the institutional master plan is approved—a process that can take up to three years—Harvard will be given the green light to begin construction in Allston.

All of the scenarios laid out in the report place undergraduate Houses along the river—blocks away from the North Allston residential community. Riverfront sites are advantageous to the University, which wants to keep new Houses as close as possible to the ones on the other side of the Charles.

And Spiegelman and Kevin McCluskey ’76, Harvard’s director of community relations for Boston, both say that they would expect more opposition from residents if the Houses were built farther south.

Indeed, Berkeley says locating undergraduates along the river would be more palatable because there would be a buffer between the Houses and the Allston neighborhood.

But after experiencing firsthand how college students can change a community, residents maintain that placing undergraduates anywhere closer to the heart of their neighborhood would be unacceptable.

—Brendan R. Linn contributed to the

reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Joseph M. Tartakoff can be reached at tartakof@fas.harvard.edu.