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After Home Forward earlier this month saw its former CEO resign under a swirl of public outcry, the agency’s interim leader is pledging to right the ship.
Michael Buonocore will serve as the interim executive director of Home Forward, the city of Portland’s housing authority, for at least nine months while the agency’s board of commissioners seeks a new permanent leader. Former CEO Ivory Mathews resigned in late April following WW’s reporting on her ample travel spending on the agency’s dime while operations on the ground faltered.
During a Monday press conference at the New Columbia Apartments in North Portland, Buonocore told a room full of reporters that under his watch, Home Forward would work to repair damaged public trust.
“I want to engage directly with the community we serve, with our staff, with our jurisdictional and housing partners, and with the media,” Buonocore said, “to provide as much visibility as I can into efforts we’ll be making to repair relationships and trust.”
Buonocore, who left the Portland Housing Bureau as its interim director on Friday to fill the Home Forward position—also on an interim basis—promised he would work to increase occupancy and decrease turnover times across Home Forward’s apartment buildings, work to address security concerns from tenants, and increase communication and transparency between organization leadership and unionized staff—a clear pain point that emerged as the scandal around Mathews devolved.
Buonocore also said he was scrapping the CEO title assumed by Mathews, and would instead take the title of executive director, “recognizing that this is the role of a public official and not a corporate executive.”
All three senior leaders at the organization—the chief executive officer, chief operating officer, and chief people and culture officer—will take 10% salary cuts, Buonocore announced. (WW previously reported that Mathews and those three leaders saw at least a 40% salary raise in a span of just three years. When she left, Mathews was making $342,000 a year, plus benefits.)
Prior to Mathews’ resignation, the board pledged to bring in a third-party consultant to assess Home Forward’s operations, policies and finances. Buonocore said Monday the exact scope of that investigation had not been determined, nor had a contractor been selected to conduct the work. The organization has also promised to create a public-facing dashboard that reflects real-time occupancy rates and unit turnover times.
Home Forward’s pledge to turn over a new leaf comes on the heels of months of reporting by WW that painted a picture of a housing authority that in several ways was failing its low-income residents and nearing the red financially, even as its CEO and top leaders saw big salary bumps and Mathews traversed the country attending networking events and conferences.
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.
But public pressure on the organization finally reached a fever pitch when WW reported that Mathews had spent over $100,000 on agency-funded travel during a three-year period. News that she attended Hawaii in 2024 for a seven-day trip during which she could provide no proof of doing any work added to the growing swell of discontent, as did reporting that found she took 10 employees to an Orlando conference in 2024 during which some of them helped her campaign for a leadership position in a national housing guild, a position for which she was running unopposed.
Mathews announced her resignation April 29. Soon thereafter, the housing authority’s board of commissioners approved a severance package for Mathews of $171,000, despite the protests of AFSCME 3135, which represents 205 of the agency’s employees.
Buonocore agreed to step in while the board sought a permanent leader. He’ll serve as interim executive director for at least nine months at an annual salary of $275,000. He’s not new to the position; from 2014 to 2022, he served as the agency’s executive director.
Acknowledging that he helmed the agency when many of the issues reportedballooned—he served as executive director from 2014 to 2022, meaning he was Mathews’ predecessor—Buonocore on Monday said placing blame was an unproductive exercise.
“I was the executive director four years ago. There are decisions that I made that have implications for operations today, and so it’s all fair game,” Buonocore said. “There can’t be ego involved in this and it’s not productive to blame others, it’s just a matter of being accountable, asking hard questions and being willing to make changes.”
Buonocore was clear about one thing: No Home Forward staff would be flying to Hawaii this year on the agency’s dime.
“There will be no trips to Hawaii this year,” Buonocore said. “I will be reviewing and approving all travel out of state. We understand that while the total amount amount of travel cost relative to Home Forward’s budget is quite small, as stewards of public resources we have to be really mindful of what impression we’re making with the travel that we take.”
