By Theresa Vargas, Washington Post

The medicated patches that are supposed to numb the pain in Olivia Chase’s knees won’t stay affixed, so she adjusts them, once again, and pushes forward on her rolling walker.

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.

Click here to read the rest of the story.