A constant challenge for any university location within an urban residential enclave is to engage the neighboring community in a continuing and purposeful dialogue on how to mitigate the negative impacts and increase the positive impacts of its presence on the quality of life of that community. The Maryland Plan, a strategy resulting from a shared vision of the concerns, solutions, and needed change in the relationship between the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and its residential neighborhood, offers some useful lessons for comparable situations of community engagement in improving town/gown relationships. By focusing initially on shared concerns about the physical environment and successfully initiating agreed upon strategies to address those concerns, UWM and its neighbors have begun to move from a historically adversarial relationship to one based on trust and cooperation.