Community vs. Goliath U.

Time has not been kind to The Charlesview Apartments, a collection of squat, brutalist blocks on the corner of Western Avenue and North Harvard Street in Allston. Forty years of rain stains its concrete walls. The windows are worn and tatty, falling apart like the rest of the place, which looks like it was never finished. Its starkness, once cutting-edge, is now Soviet-era bleak.

We should all be lucky enough to live in a place like this.

Because despite its looks, Charlesview bursts with personality. The residents of its 213 mostly affordable apartments include very old ladies and very young families. It’s home to Americans, Guatemalans, Burmese, and Russians. And even though they speak 12 different languages, they have managed to make a community that is as warm, tight, stable, and safe as those their grandparents might have enjoyed.

“It’s a neighborhood,’’ says Ken Casey, an athletic, pipe-smoking 71-year-old who has lived at the development since it was finished in 1971. He was sitting in Charlesview’s pretty new cafe on a recent morning.

“If a kid falls down, you’ve got four or five mothers out there. If some stranger is in here, you got telephones ringing all over.’’

Why does the place work so well? The Rev. Samuel Johnson, chairman of the Charlesview board, thinks it’s partly because it’s stacked with immigrants, each of whom knows what it means to be new and in need of friends. “Or maybe, by chance, the residents who happen to come here, they’re good people,’’ he says. “And we just have to thank God for them.’’

Now, it just so happens that Charlesview sits on primo land, right across from Harvard University’s vaunted new science center. So Harvard gave Charlesview 6 acres on which to rebuild, just half a mile down Western Avenue. As soon as the new Charlesview is done, Harvard will raze the old one.

Cue the controversy.

There is no love lost between Harvard and some Allston residents. You can’t blame locals for being suspicious of the university and its designs on their neighborhood. After all, Harvard bought up vast chunks of land there in secret a decade ago and has a history of running roughshod over the neighbors.

Allston residents see the Charlesview plan as another example of that Ivy League arrogance. They object to the design for the new housing, saying it concentrates too many poor people in one place. The developers have made a sincere attempt to address their concerns, but for some Allston residents, it hasn’t been enough.

“We’re happy to have that development and those people move over here,’’ says Harry Mattison, a member of the neighborhood planning task force.

“But all the experts say having large concentrations of people living in urban poverty is horrible. We want people from different walks of life all living together, and that is better for everyone.’’

All of this makes good sense, until you talk to the actual people who would be moving. While Charlesview residents are thrilled at the prospect of gleaming new homes, they don’t want to be spread out any farther than current plans allow.

“Because of that strong caring, they don’t want to be broken up,’’ Johnson says. “We have some elderly people who have been here for 40 years. They don’t want to lose that sense of neighborliness.’’

If you were planning a community from scratch, you’d make it different from the existing Charlesview in just about every way. But the new Charlesview isn’t some abstract exercise in urban planning. It’s a living, breathing community, a thriving one at that.

Any neighborhood would be lucky to have these people, just as they are.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com