Mr. Roberts co-founded CHI in 1991, after spending nearly 20 years as a television news
correspondent in New York. He was a reporter and anchor for WVIR-TV in Charlottesville,
Virginia, WRGB-TV in Albany, and WPIX-TV in New York City. He won numerous awards for
his investigative reporting, including two Emmy Nominations and the Associated Press
Broadcasters Award for General Excellence in Individual Reporting.
The son of two Jewish refugees—his father escaping from Russia and the Bolshevik
Revolution as a baby in 1921, and mother from France and the Holocaust in 1939—Mr.
Roberts felt a special responsibility to improve the world. He found his calling while
reporting on the emergence for the first time of family homelessness in the late 1980’s in
New York.
The Westchester resident founded Community Housing Innovations out of his home in
Rye Brook in 1991, and quickly became the largest nonprofit provider of emergency
housing and services outside of New York City, with shelters and emergency apartments
in Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Dutchess and Orange Counties. As founder and CEO of
Community Housing Innovations for 30 years, Mr. Roberts fought for decent housing and
greater economic opportunity for homeless and low-income people, expanding the
agency’s operation of shelters to include development of permanent affordable housing,
administering $17 million in down payment assistance to 750 first time homebuyers, and
offering foreclosure prevention services during the 2008 financial crisis and COVID
pandemic. Mr. Roberts retired in 2021 with an agency budget of more than $32 million
and over 200 employees and remains a volunteer on the board of CHI as Founder and
CEO Emeritus. As part of the CHI Board’s search committee for his successor, Mr. Roberts
is proud to have hired Ron Abad, a former Assistant Commissioner for the NYC
Department of Homeless Services, who has since expanded CHI’s services to New York
City, with the goal of promoting economic and social independence and ending
generational poverty.