Earlier this month, WW reported how Ivory Mathews, the CEO of Home Forward, spent over $100,000 on agency-funded travel between 2023 and 2025, crisscrossing the country to attend housing conferences and networking events.
Traveling on the agency’s dime, Mathews spent an average of 45 days a year out of state, even as Home Forward, the city of Portland’s housing authority, struggled to fill empty units, allowed drug markets to enter some of its buildings, and saw its housing portfolio of 7,000 units inch closer to financial distress.
Until now, the outlier among those trips was an October 2024 visit to Hawaii, where Mathews says she attended an insurance conference. That trip was unusual for its cost—more than $7,000—and the inability of the agency to provide any details of what Mathews did there, including a schedule or any notes she took. Records obtained by WW last week show three other high-level leaders at Home Forward traveled to Hawaii to attend insurance conferences in recent years, at a cost totaling around $24,000…