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The struggles of Portland’s housing authority are by now widely known.
Home Forward, a public agency that works closely with city officials, owns 7,000 low-income apartments and provides rent assistance vouchers to roughly 12,000 Multnomah County residents.
But as WW has reported, the agency has had a tough few years. Its bottom line has eroded amid high rates of nonpayment of rent, expiring COVID-era rent assistance programs, rising operating costs, and a challenging federal funding landscape.
And despite the region’s ongoing housing shortage, WW reported late last year that as many as 14% of Home Forward’s units stood vacant, and it took an average of 185 days to fill a vacancy, a statistic one local low-income housing developer called “egregious.”
On the ground, Home Forward tenants complain of drug markets operating within buildings and unruly conditions enabled by overwhelmed property managers—as well as policy changes that lowered the bar to tenancy at Home Forward buildings and increased the difficulty of penalizing tenants who committed crimes on the premises.
While the agency and the tenants it serves struggled, however, WW has learned that Home Forward CEO Ivory Mathews spent an average of 45 days a year over the past three years crisscrossing the country to attend housing conferences and networking events. At some of those events, she campaigned to become a board officer of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, an honor she attained in September.
Between 2023 and 2025, a review of public records reveals, Mathews spent more than $100,000 in public dollars on travel, including airfare, hotels, meals, extra checked luggage, and Uber fares. Home Forward paid Mathews’ travel expenses out of its operating budget.
In 2025 alone, Mathews made at least 14 taxpayer-funded trips outside the state—and at least eight were to NAHRO conferences. By comparison, Molly Rogers, director of the Washington County Department of Housing Services spent a total of $6,200 on travel and training in 2025. Her office says she attended NAHRO conferences online—a free option—but attended none in person. Shannon Callahan, director of Clackamas County’s housing authority, spent a total of $54 on travel in 2025; an employee of hers went to one NAHRO conference last year at a total cost of $1,433.
Mathews, whose annual salary is $342,849 plus benefits, including a $600-a-month car allowance, says her travel to NAHRO conferences “ensures Home Forward is connected to best practices, peer agencies, and federal policy decisions that directly impact our funding and operations,” and that her successful run for a leadership position there “did not interfere with my responsibilities as CEO” because the agency “has an experienced executive team in place, and we maintain clear communication to ensure continuity of operations regardless of travel or leave.”
Home Forward board chair Matthew Gebhardt defends Mathews’ travel and says the board has “full confidence” in her leadership.
“Ivory’s engagement in national affordable housing organizations is a core part of her role and strengthens our work by connecting Home Forward to best practices, peer providers, and federal policy conversations,” Gebhardt said in a statement, noting that 75% of the agency’s budget comes from the feds.
But others say it strikes a sour note, given the state of Home Forward’s housing portfolio and the deteriorating living conditions its tenants have described to WW across multiple buildings.
“When an organization is in crisis, you expect leaders to be present,” City Councilor Eric Zimmerman says. “I think the hundreds of vacant units and six-month average vacancy is damning information. The Home Forward board of commissioners and the executive team need to be fully engaged in turning this around, and I have deep concerns about the future of Home Forward.”
Home Forward’s board of commissioners—with two members appointed by the city of Gresham, four by the city of Portland, two by Multnomah County, and a tenant selected by Home Forward—hired Mathews to serve as the agency’s CEO in 2022. She succeeded Michael Buonocore, who led the agency from 2015 to 2022 and is now interim director of the Portland Housing Bureau.
Mathews left her job at the Columbia Housing Authority in South Carolina and a year later purchased a home in Tigard, outside Home Forward’s service area. Home Forward serves a much bigger market than Mathews oversaw in Columbia—six times the budget.
Mathews has helmed the Portland agency during a difficult time. Affordable housing providers are experiencing soaring operating costs, and providers like Home Forward say their clients are often dealing with more serious addiction and mental health issues than they were before the pandemic.
Half of Home Forward tenants are more than 30 days delinquent on rent, agency spokesman Rylee Ahnen recently told WW.
Yet even as Home Forward struggled with declining federal support and growing tenant challenges, Mathews has spent a substantial amount of her time traveling. It is unclear how her trips benefited Home Forward’s tenants or the agency.
Documents obtained by WW through public records requests show most of the conferences Mathews attended were hosted by the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, an advocacy group made up of housing officials across the country. In 2024 alone, Mathews spent at least 50 days out of the state.
WW’s tally of what Mathews spent is likely a low estimate; the records Home Forward provided in response to WW’s requests were originally incomplete, and it’s unclear whether WW has all the responsive documents now. Home Forward did not dispute WW’s figures, but did not provide its own estimate of Mathews’ spending across the three-year period.
Mathews’ travel schedule during those three years often included two or three trips in a single month.
In 2024, Mathews flew to Washington, D.C., on April 1 and returned to Portland on April 11. From April 3 to 6 she attended the National Forum for Black Public Administrators in Baltimore. She then traveled to D.C. for an April 8-10 NAHRO conference. Ten days after returning to Portland, she flew to Anchorage, Alaska, for another housing conference; her five days there included ATV riding. A month later, in May 2024, receipts show Mathews booked a two-day trip to D.C. Airfare cost $1,521.
During a September 2024 trip to Orlando for a three-day NAHRO conference, Mathews spent $355 a night on a hotel room with two queen beds and a balcony with a view of the hotel’s poolside laser show. She spent the next five nights at the Orlando Marriott for a total of $1,783. She spent six days in Hawaii the following month. Six nights at a resort there cost the agency $4,767.
Often, records show, Mathews would bring up to three additional checked bags to conferences, sometimes racking up baggage fees of $220 each way.
While Mathews traveled in late 2024 and most of 2025, she also actively campaigned for a leadership position at NAHRO. In a September 2024 Facebook post, Mathews announced her candidacy for the association’s senior vice president position.
“With your steadfast support, the possibilities of what we can accomplish together are limitless,” Mathews wrote in the September post. “If you’re at the NAHRO National Conference and Exhibition, I invite you to drop by my campaign booth and let’s chat.”
In subsequent months, she traveled to Washington, D.C., Sacramento, Atlanta, New York, Tampa and Phoenix for housing conferences.
Mathews’ Facebook page offers a window into her travels. In early February 2025, Mathews flew to a NAHRO conference in Connecticut where she campaigned—and, a week later, she stumped at another conference in Texas. “It was a pleasure connecting with colleagues from Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island and sharing my vision for serving in the role of Senior Vice-President of NAHRO,” she wrote on Facebook.
At a March 2025 NAHRO conference held in D.C., Mathews urged on Facebook that attendees stop by her campaign booth. “At my campaign booth, I proudly offer visitors a complimentary pair of handmade housing earrings that I’ve crafted,” Mathews wrote, accompanied by an image of dangly earrings affixed to tiny silver houses and packaged with a campaign sticker of Mathews’ face. “These earrings are not just accessories; they represent the spirit of community and creativity.”
Mathews’ campaigning worked. At NAHRO’s Phoenix conference on Sept. 30, 2025, Mathews was sworn in as the organization’s senior vice president. (Four other Home Forward executives attended the conference alongside Mathews: the agency’s chief financial officer, chief operating officer, chief people and culture officer, and its director of equity. WW did not receive records of travel expenses for any Home Forward staff other than Mathews.)
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) congratulated Mathews on her win. “Ivory has been a tireless national advocate and leader in ensuring housing is affordable and abundant,” he said in a statement then. “Having Oregon voices like Ivory’s in national leadership positions benefits our entire state.”
But as Mathews jetted across the country, Home Forward was falling into deeper financial trouble.
The agency’s debt service coverage ratio, an important metric of an organization’s ability to service its debts, was inching toward the red; Home Forward’s dropped from 2.36 in 2020 to 1.12 in 2025. (A ratio of 1.0 means Home Forward is bringing in just enough money to pay its debts; anything below 1.0 means Home Forward cannot cover its debts.)
As the agency’s finances worsened, Mathews enjoyed substantial annual raises. Her current annual salary of $342,849 is a 59% increase from her 2022 salary.
Gebhardt says Home Forward’s board stands behind Mathews.
“The challenges facing affordable housing providers in the Portland metro area are driven by broader economic pressures, rising costs, and federal funding uncertainty—not by Ivory’s national engagement,” he says. “In fact, her work at the national level helps position Home Forward to better navigate those challenges.”
Just hours before WW published this story, Home Forward pledged in a press release to institute new transparency and accountability measures. The agency promised a public-facing dashboard with its data—the vacancy rate is now roughly 10%, it says—and pledged to reach a 94% occupancy level; Mathews also said she would ask the board to hire an independent third-party consultant to “evaluate the agency’s current strategies and operations.” Mathews said in the press release that “transparency is critical to building and maintaining public trust.”
Separate from the press release, Mathews says her conference travel benefits Home Forward. “That perspective helps strengthen how we respond to challenges locally,” Mathews says, “while our team continues to make progress on key priorities.”
