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Leadership Quote by Mary Landrieu

"Do you know how many houses all of the nonprofits have built? No more than 5,000 in five years. Do you know how many we lost? Two hundred thousand"

About this Quote

Scarcity is doing the heavy lifting here, and Mary Landrieu knows it. She doesn’t argue that nonprofits are useless; she uses their measurable good as a yardstick for the scale of failure. “5,000 in five years” is not a dismissal of charity so much as a controlled demolition of the comforting narrative that volunteerism can patch structural collapse. Then she drops “Two hundred thousand” like a gavel. The whiplash is the point: it forces the listener to feel, not just understand, the mismatch between feel-good rebuilding stories and the actual housing crater.

The intent is political triage. Landrieu is pushing the conversation away from ribbon-cuttings and toward state capacity: zoning, insurance markets, federal appropriations, levee systems, permitting, infrastructure. In the post-Katrina atmosphere where image management competed with recovery, the quote functions as an anti-PR weapon. It’s designed to embarrass anyone treating incremental progress as adequate, including federal agencies, state leadership, and a media ecosystem hungry for “resilience” narratives.

Subtext: stop outsourcing moral responsibility to nonprofits. Praise for NGOs can become a way for governments to launder inaction - applaud the helpers, then quietly accept the status quo. Landrieu’s numbers puncture that bargain. The rhetorical structure is courtroom-simple: two questions, two answers, and a verdict. By forcing the listener to do the subtraction in their head, she turns policy into arithmetic and makes complacency look mathematically absurd.

Quote Details

TopicJustice
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Landrieu, Mary. (2026, January 17). Do you know how many houses all of the nonprofits have built? No more than 5,000 in five years. Do you know how many we lost? Two hundred thousand. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/do-you-know-how-many-houses-all-of-the-nonprofits-70314/

Chicago Style
Landrieu, Mary. "Do you know how many houses all of the nonprofits have built? No more than 5,000 in five years. Do you know how many we lost? Two hundred thousand." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/do-you-know-how-many-houses-all-of-the-nonprofits-70314/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Do you know how many houses all of the nonprofits have built? No more than 5,000 in five years. Do you know how many we lost? Two hundred thousand." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/do-you-know-how-many-houses-all-of-the-nonprofits-70314/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.

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Do you know how many houses nonprofits built No more than 5,000
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About the Author

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Mary Landrieu (born November 23, 1955) is a Politician from USA.

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