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Lottery sales fast-paced in low-income, Latino and Asian neighborhoods
Three California Lottery Scratchers tickets, littered on the ground in Los Angeles.
(
Kevin Ferguson/KPCC
)
Listen
4:10
Lottery sales fast-paced in low-income, Latino and Asian neighborhoods
This is the second of a two-part series. The audio from the first part is available here.
A cluster of stores in Orange County, all in Westminster and Garden Grove, were among the lottery’s 30 biggest retailers in 2016 and 2017. The six stores — Gallop Liquor, Café Trang, Coffee Lovers, Al’s Market, LaunderLand and Café Deng — together sold $53.3 million in lottery tickets.
The retailers all sit in census tracts that are home to a plurality of Asian-Americans, and are among the bottom group of incomes in the county.
That trend echoes KPCC/LAist's analysis of two years of ticket sales data, which found that, across California:
- Ticket sales are disproportionately high in the poorest quarter of census tracts in nearly every populous county.
- Ticket sales are disproportionately high in Southern California census tracts with a plurality of Asian-Americans or Latinos.
- Ticket sales are disproportionately high in the Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura.
Click on the play button above to hear the audio for this story. And you can head over to LAist.com to read the full story.
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You come to LAist because you want independent reporting and trustworthy local information. Our nonprofit newsroom doesn’t answer to shareholders looking to turn a profit. Instead, we answer to you and our communities. We are free to follow facts wherever they lead and to hold power to account without fear or favor. Our only loyalty is to our readers and listeners and our mission: to inform, engage, and strengthen Southern California’s communities.
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