Google Trends: Chicago’s Rental Assistance amidst COVID-19
By Cyril Dela Rosa
COVID-19’s classification as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention transitioned the world into its current state of insecurity in many senses. Amongst the different scarcities originating from the pandemic shutting down global economies, housing insecurity has particularly arisen within already volatile housing markets like Chicago.
As a city fraught with redevelopment and gentrification trends that threaten housing affordability, Chicago’s own municipal government has previously responded with varying housing protection interventions. While the success of these interventions can be debated, further attention should be figuratively and literally paid to the insecurity many tenants face during the pandemic. The economic downturn has led to many job cuts and stymied wages, which then impact the ability of tenants to make monthly rent payments.
In response to these financial struggles and the underlying risk of evictions that face tenants, the State of Illinois had temporarily intervened by placing a moratorium on all evictions beginning in March 2020. And while being extended to several deadlines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic’s duration, its hold has come to an end on October 3rd.
Throughout this time of heightened housing insecurity, search terms like “rental assistance” were widely searched. This Google Trends chart works to highlight significant trends of both this term and eviction moratoriums being searched as at-risk tenants sought to find online resources for support.
Historical context should also be noted to understand significant changes throughout the chart. The massive spike of “rental assistance” being searched around August 9, 2020, must be related to the State of Illinois offering $5,000 grants to in-need tenants who applied. Further investigation of the timeline can peel away layers of how the City of Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois state lawmakers sought to provide temporary services for housing insecure residents during a still ongoing pandemic.
Google Trends: What color was “The Dress” in 2015?
Black and blue, or white and gold?
A cultural conversation arose in the midst of 2015 virality that divided friends, family, co-workers, and other online onlookers over one particular question: what was the color of the dress? This dress under question stirred Internet and interpersonal conversations concerning if its true colors were black and blue, or white and gold.
The dress pictured and shared around the world was initially photographed by Englishwoman Cecilia Bleasdale in early February. After first being shared with her daughter Grace in preparation for a wedding, disagreement began to arise concerning the dress’s color perception. While Cecilia found the dress to be black and blue, Grace argued its colors were most certainly white and gold.
After being shared within private Facebook groups and in-person discussions, the dress debate subsided until being further reposted on February 26th in a Tumblr blog. Overnight, discourse over the color boiled over in a very unexpected yet extraordinary way. The Google Trends chart initially presented depicts how searches spiked the next day and persisted around the world for about a week.
What is then the correct answer for the true colors of the dress? The physical coloring of the sewn dress can be cited. Neuroscientists can also unpack how individual light perception enables every viewer to perceive different color pairs. A definite answer is not so easily found.
But to instead signify which color pair more viewers perceived, this Google Trends chart demonstrates a slight bias towards “white and gold dress” being searched more than “black and blue dress” on February 27th — the day the dress became viral. However, the latter was then searched more in the following days. This trend may indicate a bias towards the dress being perceived as black and blue in subsequent conversations.
