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Ivory Mathews, the embattled CEO of Home Forward, the state’s largest public housing authority, is resigning. That’s according to people with direct knowledge of Mathews’ decision, which has not yet been announced by the agency.
Mathews’ impending resignation follows reporting by WW that showed she spent more than $100,000 on agency-funded travel over the last three years, criss-crossing the country to attend housing conferences and networking events, even as her agency fell into disarray. Home Forward provides affordable housing and vouchers to Multnomah County’s poorest residents, but saw its vacancy rate spike to 15% last year and several of its buildings fail to meet their debt service ratios.
Home Forward did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear who will serve as interim CEO while the agency figures out next steps.
Mathews’ impending departure follows two weeks of mounting pressure after WW’s April 14 story detailing Mathews’ extensive travel.
The union representing 205 of Home Forward’s 330 employees said last week it had “no confidence or trust” in Mathews. Half of the Portland City Council expressed concerns about the state of the agency or Mathews’ travel. And controversy intensified as WW uncovered more details in the last two weeks about Mathews’ travel habits—such as a 6-day trip to Hawaii Mathews took from which she could produce no proof of work-related activity, or the 2024 Orlando trip that 10 agency staff attended, some of whom helped their boss campaign for a leadership position in an industry group.
Through it all, the Home Forward board of commissioners defended Mathews. Members of the board—including board chair Matthew Gebhardt—said travel to conferences was an important aspect of Mathews’ job and that she applied lessons learned to Home Forward’s operations at home. (The agency has not provided a concrete example of this application.)
But in the three years Mathews averaged 45 days of publicly funded travel a year, Home Forward kept slipping.
As detailed by a series of WW stories in recent months, 955 vacant units lay unoccupied and the agency took on average six months to fill an empty unit, even as 7,500 people slept on Portland’s streets on any given night. The agency’s entire housing portfolio—made up of around 7,000 units—was inching closer to financial distress. Residents at the Dawson Park Apartments in North Portland begged agency officials to root out a drug market they said had moved into the building. And policy changes made at Home Foward in 2022 and 2023, analyzed by WW, showed that the agency had become more lenient about who it let into apartments, and less strict about curbing bad behavior.
But Mathews did accomplish one thing by attending so many conferences: In September 2025, the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials swore her in as senior vice president. She’d been campaigning for the position, unopposed, for a year.
Mathews’ annual salary is $342,000.
