Joe Ferro, owner of Foodtown and the attached Laundrytown, says a sale is being finalized now to buyers who “plan on running the store and keeping things the same,” though with “a bit of facelift to modern things up.” Residents hope it’s true.

Cambridge Health Alliance, coping with staff shortages like many other hospitals during the latest Covid-19 surge, is turning to a novel source for job applicants: its patients. The Alliance sent messages to its patient email list Wednesday, announcing, “CHA is Hiring!” and inviting them to apply.

What keeps a family-owned, family-operated business going in Cambridge for 46 years and counting? Good timing helps – such as long ago buying the building that holds it – but so does customer service and customer loyalty, and a mix of flexibility and tradition.

It wouldn’t feel right to let a week pass without another multimillion-dollar purchase by Denver-based Healthpeak in the Alewife area – and on Thursday came news of a $72 million transaction for 67 Smith Place.

Before a tree-cutting moratorium went into place in 2019, the pace of felled trees seemed to accelerate; while it’s not so simple for multimillion-dollar construction, developers, city councillors and Planning Board members are all trying to figure out how a lab- and office-space moratorium affects business as usual.

Rents were down 1.8 percent in December after a year in which Cambridge saw a 25.2 percent rise in prices and Somerville rose even more, according to some real estate industry analysts. Another local trend continued too: Life-sciences clusters spreading from Kendall Square.

A nonprofit that serves some of the most vulnerable in Cambridge and Somerville is pleading for volunteers to replace ones disappearing during a coronavirus spike.

An affordable-housing project that will overlook Danehy Park won praise from members of the Planning Board on Tuesday. One member called it a “poster child” for new Affordable Housing Overlay zoning that reduces the power of the board in refining projects before they’re built.

If the goal of eliminating single-family zoning in Cambridge is to right decades of racial injustice and inequity, the Planning Board was unconvinced Tuesday that the city was anywhere close to a way to achieve that.

The idea of turning Elm Street in Somerville’s Davis Square into a pedestrian-only space is popular with community members, but a licensing official says it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon – echoing administrative reluctance in Cambridge from recent years.