Willamette Week reported, citing the Pittsburgh nonprofit newsroom Public Source, that the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh is poised to pick former Home Forward CEO Ivory Mathews as its next executive director, with a board vote set for its September 24 meeting. Mathews resigned from Home Forward this spring after Willamette Week reported on her travel spending while the agency struggled to fill more than 900 empty units. Home Forward owns and operates around 7,000 affordable housing units and provides about 12,000 housing vouchers on an annual budget of around $300 million.
After Mathews' resignation, the Oregon Government Ethics Commission voted unanimously to open an investigation into her travel expenditures.
The Oregonian/OregonLive · on an exit interview with departing Portland Solutions director Skyler Brocker-Knapp
The Oregonian published an exit interview with Skyler Brocker-Knapp, the departing director of Portland Solutions, who has run the operational side of the city's shelter expansion under Mayors Wheeler and Wilson since 2021. The paper described the city-county partnership as deeply strained when she joined in 2021; Brocker-Knapp said of the relationship now, "I think we're at a really good place," and said the regional homeless services tax "has provided a lot of really important money to a system that desperately needed it" while adding changes could be made to it, including recognizing the role cities play in the region.
The Oregonian reported Brocker-Knapp's planned departure on August 12.
Skyler Brocker-Knapp, who has led Portland's effort to build its own homeless shelter and outreach system for the past four and a half years — first under Mayor Ted Wheeler, then as director of Portland Solutions under Mayor Keith Wilson — will step down from her city job next week to become chief strategy officer at United Way of the Columbia-Willamette. Her deputy director, Hank Smith, will take over on an interim basis at the end of the month.
The city confirmed in July that its city-run adult overnight shelter system will shrink to 580 beds this winter, down from 876.