California’s child poverty hits coastal Bay Area

When Michele Beserra looks at her 3-year-old granddaughter, she sees a warm, loving girl with light brown curls and a nurturing instinct — the kind of person she hopes will become a nurse or a community advocate.

But the 56-year-old Beserra becomes emotional when she thinks about her granddaughter’s new home: a tent on a plot of land in Watsonville, where the family will move this month because they can’t afford to rent anymore on her $400-a-month income. With her daughter and granddaughter, Beserra and her husband, who has been out of work for two years, plan to cook on a camp stove and bathe outdoors in a plastic pool on a ranch owned by a relative.