She has to keep walking.
She walks at 7:30 a.m. to catch a bus to take her 7-year-old grandson to summer school. She walks at noon into her church to drop off his camp registration form. She walks at 5 p.m. to pick him up from school and take him to swim practice. She walks and walks, until 7 p.m., when, finally, she and her grandson step into the one-bedroom apartment they share in Northwest Washington, a place where there is no room to entertain company because the living room is his bedroom.
“Sometimes I go until I can’t go,” says Chase, who is 60.
The walls have not yet been erected on a plot of land in Mount Vernon Triangle for a 12-story affordable-housing development, but Chase and others are already hoping it will serve as a refuge for families like theirs: grandfamilies.
The building will be the first of its kind in the city — and one of only a handful in the nation — that offers subsidized housing and services for grandparents raising grandchildren.
It will be a place, developers and city officials say, designed for two vulnerable populations: those growing up and those growing old.
