Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Chertoff

The sentence is built like a bureaucratic magic trick: say "nobody" twice, add a technical qualifier ("who's eligible"), and you can make a messy policy outcome sound airtight. Chertoff's intent is plainly defensive. He's not describing a system; he's trying to close a case, preempting the moral headline of families being tossed out of hotels with nowhere to go. The repetition of "no one has been evicted" functions less as evidence than as an incantation, meant to overwrite images of displacement with the soothing fiction of process.

The subtext is where the real work happens. "Eligible" is a trapdoor. It acknowledges, without naming them, the people who fall outside the criteria: those who missed paperwork, couldn't document residency, have immigration complications, or simply got lost in the churn. The phrase "three months of rental assistance" also smuggles in an assumption that time equals stability, that a finite subsidy can translate into an available apartment in a market where supply, credit requirements, and landlord screening do the real gatekeeping. "Significant amount of money" is vague by design; it avoids the uncomfortable math of what "significant" means against actual rents.

Contextually, this reads like crisis communications during a sheltering or migrant-housing controversy, where hotels stand in for a fraying social safety net. The halting clause "to find - to pay for their rent" betrays the strain of maintaining confidence while skirting the central question: not whether assistance exists, but whether it's enough to prevent homelessness once the hotel key stops working.