For a few months every two years, everyone in the city--especially reporters--turn their attention to politics. The municipal elections are over and done with now, though, and there's time to catch up with what else has been going on in Cambridge. What follows are short updates on a variety of issues.

Developers went to court this summer seeking to overturn the city's controversial restrictions on condominiums; when their request for a preliminary injunction was denied, the case drifted out of the headlines.

No trial date has yet been set in the dispute, thanks to a series of pre-trial motions that have bogged down the case, proponents of the law said yesterday. The developers who brought the suit want the case tried in federal court, but city attorneys have argued that the case is really on an issue of state law.

"It will be months before it ever comes to trial," one party in the case, who asked not to be identified, said yesterday.

A smaller, but equally long-running, housing controversy continues to simmer at 7 Sumner Rd., where Harvard evicted all the remaining tenants about 10 months ago after a two-year battle.

In the course of its bid to evict tenants, Graduate School of Design officials said they desperately needed the building for new office space. A visitor to the building yesterday, though, would have seen several apartments still vacant.

Plans to renovate the building to make it useful for the GSD are "just going into the working drawings stage," Edie Groden, director of building services for the school, said yesterday. She said work was "pretty much on schedule" and might begin near the first of next year; when it does, the few offices that are in the building will have to "squish" back inside Gund Hall, Groden said.

Harvard's relations with the tenants it still has were tense through the spring and summer but seemed to quiet down this fall. Michael Turk, an officer of the Harvard Tenants Union, said much of the lull was due to tenant participation in the city council campaign.

An HTU meeting December 10 will kick off the next tenant drive--to force Harvard to bear some of the costs for deferred maintenance it is only now performing. In the last year Harvard Real Estate has asked for many rent increases from the city's rent control board based on repair and improvement work it has performed.

Such expenses should not be passed on to tenants, Turk says, if they were caused by neglect in past years. "I think we may be on a collision course with Harvard's 'five-year-plan'" for improvements, Turk said, adding that the HTU drive would center on an effort to force the Rent Board to reinterpret its own guidelines.

Another HTU campaign that has been on the back burner for several months--a suit against the University to recover money from tax abatements that tenants charge Harvard never passed on to them--may be rekindled in the weeks to come.

The suit will require an attorney, and Turk says money shortages have prevented the HTU from retaining a lawyer. A fundraising event will be held in the next few weeks, and if it is successful, the case will be reactivated. "In the meantime, nothing's been filed, not much has happened," Turk said.

An HTU meeting less than a year ago was attended by a University lawyer who apparently gave an altered name and address to meeting organizers. Sources in the state say the complaint brought against the lawyer, Kenneth Erickson, has pretty much been dropped.

Erickson was unavailable for comment; sources say, however, that he wrote an indirect apology to the state board of bar overseers about the incident. The board apparently also scolded the tenants union for publicizing the case in local newspapers.

Across Cambridge a spate of large development projects are quietly nearing the start of construction, assistant city manager for community development David Vickery said yesterday. "You'll see a lot going on in the next year," he promised.