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Home Forward, the city’s housing authority, last week divulged more information to its board of commissioners about its high vacancy rates, nonpayment of rent and cash flow woes.
As WW has reported in a series of recent stories, Home Forward, which provides over 12,000 federal housing vouchers and 7,000 units of affordable housing across the city, is in dire straits. Its buildings are inching closer to financial distress, due in part to high rates of nonpayment of rent, vacancies and rising operational costs. Residents across its buildings complain of drug dealing inside building walls and unfettered access, resulting in strangers entering to use and buy drugs, sleep and loiter. And a vacancy rate that rose to 14% in November (more recently 11.7%, according to the agency) means that more than 900 units of affordable housing are sitting unoccupied as city officials vow that solving the unsheltered homelessness of 7,500 people is a top priority.
At the Home Forward Board of Commissioners meeting on March 17, top agency officials explained to the board how the agency had gotten to such a bad place.
“This felt prudent, given some of the recent coverage that we’ve seen on the topic,” Ian Davie, the agency’s chief operating officer, told the board at the top of the meeting. “But periodically, we we want to make sure that you all are aware of what things look like within the portfolio and our greater financial picture.”
Almost all of the factors agency leaders cited as reasons for the portfolio’s decline were framed as being outside of of the agency’s control. Home Forward leaders gave commissioners the run-down of what had gone south in recent years.
The major takeaways from the board meeting provided insight into the difficulties of the affordable housing market, and what housing providers like Home Forward are grappling with as the state pushes to build thousands more units.
Market rents have dropped and affordable rents have risen so that the two were basically equal, meaning that tenants Home Forward could have attracted for its affordable units—most often the units rented to those making 60% or less of the area median income—are now opting to rent in the private market.
Home Forward tenants became increasingly unable to pay rent on time, or pay it at all. Home Forward spokesman Rylee Ahnen has previously said that just over half of its total residents are over 30 days late on rent.
Davie told the board that this number was in part due to local regulations—chiefly the city of Portland’s FAIR ordinance—that requires a landlord with an 80% area median income unit to rent to a tenant so long as their income is 2.5 times the monthly rent. That means if the monthly rent is $400, the landlord must rent to a prospective tenant whose income is $1,000.
“The reality is folks get into units that they can’t afford,” Davie told the board.
Ahnen says Home Forward “respects the intent” of FAIR, but that “compliance with City Code means that some households may be approved for units that leave very little margin in their household budgets.”
Another issue affecting renters is that any temporary rent assistance they have is considered “income” during the application process. But if that rent assistance is temporary and the tenant loses it, they’re suddenly unable to make monthly rent bills. That’s increasingly become a problem for Home Forward tenants.
Davie also noted that Home Forward’s average renter in one of its unsubsidized units—the majority of which are 60% area median income units—is making just 37.8% of the area median income. That means there’s a fundamental mismatch between what the average Home Forward renter can afford, and what they’re paying in rent.
Home Forward’s vacancy rate across its portfolio is currently 11.7%. (That’s down modestly from 14% in November, when 955 Home Forward units lay empty.)
Juli Garvey, Home Forward’s director of asset management, noted that there’s a geographic pattern to the vacancies: 47% of the vacancies across the agency’s portfolio are in just eight buildings, all located within the central city. The vast majority of those vacancies are in unsubsidized units, and mostly either studios or one-bedroom apartments. She noted that more people are opting to live in the suburbs instead of in the central city, hiking up the vacancy rates.
That statement seems to runs in contrast to what Home Forward spokesman Rylee Ahnen told WW earlier this year, when he said that high vacancies at buildings like the Louisa Flowers and Helen M. Swindells—both on the list of eight—were due in part to being “located in neighborhoods that are farther away from some of the city amenities folks might be looking for.”
There’s not enough demand for 60% AMI units, especially studios or one-bedrooms. Unfortunately, that’s the exact type of unit Home Forward and other affordable housing developers have built a lot of over the past decade, buoyed in large part by local housing bond funding and tax credit deals. “The reality is that this region really produced a lot of studios, and one-bedrooms,” Garvey told the board.
As WW reported earlier this year, the majority of units Home Forward has in the pipeline are the type of units it says aren’t attracting tenants.
Members of the Portland City Council have expressed interest in using a chunk of unspent Portland Housing Bureau dollars on “rent buy downs” at affordable buildings to remedy vacancies. How that works: The city would pay down the building’s debt obligations, and in turn the provider would lower rents in the building. Home Forward’s high vacancy rates have been at the center of the council’s discussion, and should the council approve money for such buy-downs, it’s likely Home Forward would vie for some of that money.
Home Forward either lowered rents or froze planned rent increases at a handful of buildings earlier this year after its vacancy rate became public. When asked by a board member if Home Forward could simply lower more rents to help fill vacancies, Davie replied: “We have a lot of flexibility. in theory, but in practice, given the building finances, we generally do not have a lot. In other words, if we reduce the income coming in, it starts to we start to see challenges with paying all those other costs that I just highlighted.”
The property management companies that manage many of Home Forward’s buildings can’t keep up with all the problems that emerge in the buildings, and frequent turnover at those companies mean that Home Forward buildings are constantly in a state of managerial flux, adding further instability.
The bench of property management companies “is not deep,” Garvey told the board. As WW reported, Home Forward contracts out the management of many of its buildings to a handful of property management companies, including Pinehurst Management, which some residents say has failed to keep their buildings from devolving into chaos. It takes Home Forward on average 185 days to fill one of its units, and driving up that average are the Pinehurst-managed buildings; Pinehurst took 292 days on average to fill a unit in 2025.
Home Forward previously told WW that the agency has increased pressure on its management companies to fill vacancies faster by meeting regularly with the management companies. At the March 18 board meeting, Garvey said that the agency has begun offering $5,000 bonuses to management company staff that remain at a building for more than 12 months. “If one of those team members leaves, it really shakes the stability of that property,” Garvey told the board. “Because we firmly believe that if you are there, if you are staying at the property, working at the property, getting to know the residents and community, the neighbors, everything, it will make a big impact to the operation of the building.”
At that point during the board meeting, Home Forward leadership addressed the elephant in the room: all eight of the buildings in the urban core that constitute nearly half of the overall vacancies are managed by Pinehurst. “While you could see a scenario where, especially given the coverage of late, there’s kind of a cut-and-run approach,” Davie said, “[we have done] a lot of work to invest in those relationships and frankly have tough conversations, but [also] give them some opportunities.”
Pinehurst did not respond to a request for comment.
Amid the grim information shared by the agency with its board members, the agency shared one noteworthy bright spot: The agency’s $30 million budget shortfall has shrunk to just $13.8 million. That’s because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is likely to provide more funding per voucher than Home Forward had projected during budget planning, essentially shrinking the delta between what Home Forward receives per voucher from the feds and what Home Forward’s actual costs are per voucher.
