The Wrong Solutions for Housing

by Randall O’Toole, The Antiplanner, April 27, 2026

A median household in Hawaii would have to spend 50 percent of their income to get a mortgage on a median home, according to a report by Wallethub. Because standard mortgage rules limit buyers to spending no more than 30 percent of their income on housing, housing in Hawaii is unaffordable.

Other states where median households would have to spend more than 30 percent of their incomes to buy a median home include California (43%), Massachusetts (34%), Oregon (34%), Washington (33%), Colorado (33%), Nevada (32%), Idaho (31%), plus Montana, New York, and Utah (all just over 30%). All of these states except Idaho have statewide or local laws effectively creating urban-growth boundaries that limit the amount of land available for housing. At least three major cities in Montana, for example, have growth boundaries: Bozeman, Kalispell, and Missoula. Those are also the most expensive housing markets in that state.

Unlike California and Washington, Oregon at least has a process for expanding urban-growth boundaries. However, every proposed expansion is challenged by planning groups such as 1000 Friends of Oregon. Last week, Oregon’s governor signed legislation streamlining the expansion of growth boundaries — but only for manufactured homes or senior housing. That kind of top-down planning will not provide much relief.

Seattle’s solution to high housing costs is “taller, denser, faster“: more high-density multi-family housing. But that’s not the kind of housing most people want to live in. It also costs more than single-family housing. Building expensive housing that people don’t want won’t make the housing that people want more affordable.

Meanwhile, many groups continue to promote subsidized housing as the solution to the housing affordability crisis. I’ve argued that such housing is a scam, mainly benefitting developers and not the people who need such housing.

Portland’s Willamette Week newspaper has been documenting an example of this, a Portland non-profit called Home Forward. Home Forward pays its CEO $321,000 a year plus $99,000 in “other compensation.” That also doesn’t include the more than $33,000 a year Home Forward spent on travel for its CEO, Ivory Matthews, to attend various conferences and junkets around the country.

For example, Matthews spent six nights at a resort in Hawaii, which cost taxpayers well over $7,000. Supposedly this was because Home Forward’s “captive” insurance company was located in Hawaii. According to Lewis & Clark law professor Jack Bogdanski, such insurance companies are “more often than not a tax scam.” They are often set up in Hawaii, but the “captive company” exists entirely on paper and can be run remotely.

Home Forward’s CEO “posted hundreds of photos from her trip [showing she did] horseback on the beach, toured former sugar plantations and farms, and visited canyons,” reported Willamette Week. “At no point on social media did Mathews, who often chronicles her travel to housing conferences and events, post about any work-related activity in Hawaii.”

Many of the housing conferences that Matthews did attend were run by a group called the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. In 2024, she decided to run for president of that group. Even though she was running unopposed, she brought ten other Home Forward staff members (some of whom get paid more than $200,000 a year) to the group’s Orlando conference to help her campaign for the position. (Spoiler alert: she won the election.) That cost taxpayers more than $20,000.

It would be reassuring to know that non-profit groups such as Home Forward really cared about the needs of low-income people and were working hard to provide them with decent housing. Unfortunately, Home Forward’s management of its tax-subsidized housing leaves a lot to be desired. The housing it manages has 10 to 14 percent vacancy rates and the organization takes more than 180 days to fill a vacancy. Renters complain of drug markets happening within their buildings but Home Forward recently changed its policies to make it more difficult to penalize renters who commit crimes on the premises.

Financially, the organization was losing control. In 2020, it earned more than twice the revenues it needed to service its debt, but by 2025 this had declined to 1.1 times. Matthews’ bad management was rewarded with a 59 percent pay raise between 2022 and 2025.

While it is nice to see Willamette Week exposing problems like this, readers are left with the impression that Home Forward is an exception to the rule. In fact, all of the non-profits that run the affordable housing scam pay their CEOs and other executives fat salaries, yet they do little for housing other than to siphon off a share of affordable housing funds for themselves. Moreover, in general they support policies that make housing even less affordable, such as taxes on new homes, just so they can justify getting even more taxpayer dollars for their scams.

There is a simple way to make housing more affordable: abolish urban-growth boundaries. As long as groups such as Home Forward have a major say in housing policy, that isn’t going to happen. People need to learn that these non-profits are just as self-interested as anyone else, and in general policies that benefit them are harmful to both taxpayers and home seekers.