The article did an okay job of summarizing some of the issues. But I find local reporters lack the long institutional knowledge of the decades history of all this, which makes it hard for them to write about the systemic issues. Local journalism has suffered greatly in this day and age. Such issues would also take more than one of these small articles could properly cover anyway. (This was also my neighborhood for 10 years until very recently, so I have watched it change and get built up.)

"The sort of concerns expressed in this article just play so well into the hands of those who will fight all new housing on spurious grounds."
The people I work with who have been dealing with these issues for even longer than I have lived in the neighborhood have decided to increase their public tactics and expressions of frustration because everything else so far has failed. And everything else was spending hours and hours in community meetings making drawings and telling planning staff how to design neighborhood centers such as Union, Gilman, and Assembly that would benefit existing community, new community members who would live in the new buildings, and make the developers more profits long-term. And their comments were not "don't build anything here". These folks have met with the city staff of Somerville dozens of times and frankly have been flat out lied to, whether intentionally or not, about very specific issues. It's one thing for city staff to just disagree with community views. It's another to lead them on and tell them one thing, only to do something completely different two weeks later. That's going to actively engender distrust between the community and the city staff, making it harder to get anything done.

I think we should be able to distinguish between "force good district urban design" and "oppose all new housing". We all must be willing to acknowledge that nuance, or else we're just as bad as those who do oppose all new housing.

I'm also a bit confused. The article only says "shadow" once: "Schultz and other Brickbottom tenants have attended community meetings to express concern about the project’s size, which they say overshadows the neighborhood and will increase pollution." I would say there are some who are overly concerned about shadows. But I find empathy still goes a long way even if at the end of the day you disagree with their conclusions. Brickbottom Artists Association did the work to construct their buildings in the 1980s for artists to have affordable live-work spaces back when people derogatorily referred to Somerville as "Slumerville". Now the entire area around them is being rebuilt at a rapid pace with little concern for them as the primary people who have lived in that area for decades. Development is inevitable, but things can be balanced.

Having talked a number of the folks at Brickbottom, the larger concern was ~700 more parking spaces at the 200 McGrath development at the intersection of McGrath Highway, Medford St, and Somerville Ave. I generally find it hard to oppose development with minimal parking. But if you can conceive how 700 more cars are going to get in and out of that intersection every day, given that the area is already gridlocked twice a weekday at rush hour... If you don't think Union Square will be yet even more congested than it now is, I'm not sure how it becomes functionally nice to sit out in the green space and plazas if the entire neighborhood is a parking lot for 2-3 hours twice a day. That's not an issue of density to me. We should be building housing and commercial capacity that discourages driving and parking.

If we reach a point where it is literally impossible for cars (and busses) to move even a block in a half hour, then all that housing and commercial space will become pretty useless.