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According to Pittsburgh’s Public Source, a nonprofit newsroom based in Pittsburgh, the city’s housing authority is poised to pick former Home Forward CEO Ivory Mathews as the agency’s new executive director.
The board for the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh is set to take a vote at its Sept. 24 meeting on whether to hire Mathews for the job. If hired, she would replace a longtime executive director who is seeking to retire.
Mathews resigned from Home Forward under a cloud of controversy this spring after WW reported on her superfluous travel spending while conditions inside her agency’s buildings deteriorated, the agency struggled to fill its more than 900 empty units in a timely manner, and as its housing portfolio inched closer to the red. Home Forward, which functions as the city of Portland’s housing authority, owns and operates around 7,000 affordable housing units and provides about 12,000 housing vouchers across the metro area. With an annual budget of around $300 million, most of it flowing from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Home Forward is the largest affordable housing provider in the state.
After Mathews’ resignation, the Oregon Government Ethics Commission voted unanimously to launch an investigation into Mathews’ travel expenditures. A preliminary report by commission staff—conducted prior to the commission’s vote for a full probe—found that Mathews had authorized her own travel and may have spent agency money on lodging and travel for family members, among other potential violations of ethics laws. The staff investigator determined there was “substantial objective basis to believe that Mathews may have violated the use of office and conflict of interest provisions.”
The ethics commission investigation remains ongoing.
According to the Pittsburgh housing authority’s board documents, a hiring firm recommended Mathews after narrowing the pool of candidates down to four finalists.
