When failure succeeds
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| Combined annual salaries: $1,129,063. |
Sophie Peel of the Weed put on her big girl pants and committed an act of journalism this week with a hard-hitting story about the corporation that operates Portland's public housing projects. It's running itself into the ground financially.
At a number of its properties, Home Forward is not collecting enough revenue either to pay off the buildings’ annual debts or to fund its operating expenses, forcing the agency to make interagency loans to properties that aren’t generating enough revenue. As a result, its real estate portfolio is moving dangerously close to financial distress....
Phil Keisling, former Oregon secretary of state and onetime director of Portland State University’s Center for Public Policy from 2010 to 2019, says Home Forward is in dire need of a performance audit.
“The broad outline [of its operations] suggests a very large and critical public agency that’s in desperate need of a thorough performance audit years ago,” Keisling says, “and could especially benefit from one now.”
Such an audit could examine the cash Home Forward is moving around to cover properties that can’t cover their expenses alone.
In a major breach of Portland Polite, Peel then calls out the four honchos running the place, by name, for taking big fat raises while the ship sinks.
Among other cost-saving measures, the agency froze all salaries for its top executives in 2026, meaning that none of its four top executives—the CEO, the chief operating officer, the chief financial officer, or the chief people and culture officer—received a raise this year.
But even without a current year raise, what those four executives make seems to contrast with the agency’s financial performance.
Ivory Mathews, Home Forward’s CEO, came to the agency in 2022 from a housing authority in South Carolina. That year, her salary was $215,001. In 2023, her salary jumped to $253,242, and then again in 2024 to $321,635. In 2025, it rose again to $342,849. (That doesn’t include benefits and other compensation.) It represents a 59% increase in salary in a span of just three years.
Kandy Sage, the agency’s chief financial officer, jumped from making $155,318 in 2022 to $247,699 in 2025—a 59% increase in just three years.
Ian Davie, the chief operating officer, went from making $157,351 in 2022 to $264,445 in 2025, a 68% increase. And Kitty Miller, the agency’s chief people and culture officer, jumped from making $157,351 in 2022 to $274,070 in 2025, a 74% increase.
If we were supposed to be outraged, I don't know about you, but it worked for me.
Sophie Peele is an excellent journalist and has been for years. Should have won a Pulitzer for her reporting on the "marijuana couple" who showered Kotek, the D-party and others with mind blowing amounts of money....which Kotek, the D-party etc. RETURNED when her reporting exposed the couple's sketchy (at best) background. Why is Val Hoyle still in Congress? She was up to her eyeballs trying to help the "marijuana couple." Peele later found out Fagan, the Dufur Democrat who was Secretary of State, was being paid a retainer of $10-grand a month by the "marijuana couple." Fagan resigned as Sec State and got a hand slap from the ethics gods. More recently we learned from Peele the snazzy socialists on the nation's goofiest city council were texting each other in real time during council meetings, spewing insults about "the others" and "strategizing" their votes. Is that case still in front of Ethics Commission?
ReplyDeleteDamn it...my bad. It is Sophie Peel.
ReplyDeleteWishful thinking to expect Peel to follow up with other agencies milking the public purse. Most of the NGOs are really quasi-banks and money laundries...cut-outs that turn public money into state secrets. They're basically unaccountable (the only numbers you'll ever see are on federal form 990s, which are usually two years old), and they exist in the chummy world between bureaucrats and people doing well by doing good--although the 990s never tell you the "what they do" specifically. They lend their logos to pols' election binders shamelessly, although they're supposed to keep their noses out of politics.
ReplyDeleteHistory from website: On December 11, 1941, after the United States entered World War II, Portland City Council created the Housing Authority of Portland (now Home Forward) as an emergency means of managing the temporary housing built for wartime workers.
ReplyDeleteThough the purpose was never to be permanent, and the intention was not to operate a large portfolio, for better and worse, both occurred. Today, Home Forward acknowledges responsibility for its past and aims to live up to its organizational values and better fulfill its mission.
So instead of shutting it down as being no longer relevant, they just doubled down and created a bigger teat to suck on. That teat these days must be just about hitting the ground...
What I don't understand is how Ivory Mathews got this plum job with the city. Sure, she's a woman of color from the South, but she doesn't have the funny eyeglass frames! Maybe she just took them off for the photo. And apparently she didn't want to go out to the park with the others.
ReplyDeleteIt seems likely that Home Forward execs compared their salaries with the execs of the various non-profits and decided they weren't getting enough. From the 990s, Mercy Housing paid its CEO about $437,000 and its CFO $332,000 in 2021 while Habitat for Humanity paid its CEO $419,000, its COO $319,000, and its “chief people officer” $233,000. In 2020, Community Partners paid its CEO $327,000 and its CFO $225,000.
ReplyDeleteLet's stop calling it affordable housing and start calling it what it is: subsidized housing whose subsidies primarily benefit the developers and banks.
Hey, some people's mortgages get paid!
DeleteSooo...the tenants who are behind on their rent will now have it all-paid-up with the recently-"found" money (the Council was saying they want to use a big-chunk of it for "emergency rent assistance")-? Why was the "found" HA money not immediately used to cover the shortfalls from unpaid rents - did the Council even know about it-??
ReplyDeleteThe unpaid rent issue sounds like, at least in part, a staffing issue. Public housing generally requires more staffing than private/market-rate housing. Support staff is needed to help tenants who may be struggling with basic tasks, to resolve behavorial issues, etc. (and making sure they're paying the rent/bills), with a goal of keeping them housed and, if the HA is doing it right, to uplift them & become more self-sufficient.
That's more aligned with the "housing first" model, which is used successfully in countries where the developers & other profiteers don't have their elected officials in their pockets.
Getting somebody into housing is only a part of it - someone who has been long-time homeless or is facing other struggles will need some help, at least intially, to adapt & learn whatever skills they need to succeed.
This is supposed to be a role of a housing authority - to get folks into housing who can't afford market-rate, and do it safely & humanely.
But it requires skilled staffing & management.
Perhaps the high salaries for these few executive positions would be better spent on staffing-up.
(It's not just Portland - I don't know of any local housing authority that's accomplishing what is supposed to be their mandate, they've largely been privatized and/or corrupted beyond recognition.)