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.

A new executive director for the Central Square Business Improvement District has been chosen: Luis Cotto, now the program manager for cultural districts at the Mass Cultural Council.