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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 past three years, crisscrossing the country to attend housing conferences and networking events, even as her agency fell into disarray. Home Forward provides affordable housing and rent 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.
Update, April 29 at 9:05 a.m: Home Forward announced Mathews’ resignation on Wednesday morning. Michael Buonocore, interim director at the Portland Housing Bureau and former executive director of Home Forward from 2014 to 2022, will step in as interim CEO while the agency looks for a new leader. “Strengthening our accountability to residents, partners, and the public is the top priority I will carry as interim,” Buonocore said in a statement. Mathews said she was committed to “ensuring a smooth transition.”
Mathews will receive a severance package of six months’ pay—$171,424.80—as well as six months of COBRA health insurance and accrued vacation time. Home Forward also agreed to pay her up to $50,000 in outplacement services to help her find her next job.
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 past two weeks about Mathews’ travel habits—such as a six-day trip to Hawaii that 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 at the industry group hosting the conference.
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 that 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 Forward in 2022 and 2023, analyzed by WW, showed that the agency had become more lenient about whom 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.
The agency has not yet provided details of Mathews’ severance package—if one exists—to WW.
