Creating Equity Between Walls: How Mohak Chauhan is Using Engineering, Finance, and Community Vision to Reengineer Affordable Housing

Right now, millions of families spend over half their paychecks just to have a place to live. By 2025, the number of renter households under this kind of strain is set to hit 13 million. The problem keeps growing. Prices for materials and labor climb. There's less land to build on, and the rules around construction just get more tangled.

That’s where people like Mohak Chauhan come in. He brings together skills in real estate finance, a background in civil engineering, and a genuine focus on the needs of real communities. Mohak isn’t just improving existing systems—he’s helping shape what affordable, sustainable housing can become.

Chauhan has been involved in around 400 construction, preservation, and home improvement projects in the affordable and low-to-moderate income housing space. His work sits at the intersection of complex financing, regulatory compliance, and large-scale construction delivery. He combines practical knowledge of construction and engineering with experience in real estate finance, creative subsidy layering, and collaborative program management across public and private partners.

“Mohak brings a strategic lens to mission-driven development,” notes a community-development expert. “He understands that cost control, sustainability, and social impact are three pillars of success—and he engineers them together.”

Through careful planning and value engineering, his teams have achieved meaningful cost efficiencies while ensuring that projects meet high standards for quality, safety, and long-term affordability. His approach also emphasizes inclusion—striving to maintain participation of minority- and women-owned businesses (MWBE) at or above 30% across projects.

Chauhan has also built frameworks to keep projects compliant with prevailing wage, energy efficiency, and community hiring commitments. By engaging early with design and procurement teams, he helps ensure that construction quality and environmental performance remain strong without exceeding budget constraints or delaying delivery timelines.

Beyond project delivery, Mohak invests in mentoring and education. He collaborates with universities and community organizations to connect students and emerging professionals to real-world affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization projects—helping build the next generation of practitioners who value both technical excellence and social impact.

“Affordable housing cannot be a compromise on quality or community—it must be resilient, equitable, and efficient,” says Mohak Chauhan.

As the affordable-housing gap widens—where the shortage of homes available to extremely low-income renters exceeds 7 million—professionals who can bridge finance, engineering, and community outcomes are scarce. Mohak’s multi-disciplinary approach benefits individual families (by reducing housing cost burdens), local economies (by training MWBE workers and revitalizing neighborhoods), and municipal infrastructure (by delivering sustainable assets rather than short-lived developments).

Looking forward, Mohak is developing a scalable framework for “housing equity vehicles” that aggregate land parcels, layered finance and off-site construction modules—designed to accelerate delivery of mission-driven housing across underserved regions. He also plans to lead a research initiative into energy-affordable housing models tied to community-wealth outcomes, aligning with global trends in sustainable development.

In a time when affordable housing is too often described in crisis terms, Mohak Chauhan offers something different: a blueprint for change where cost-efficient engineering, inclusive workforce strategy and financial innovation converge. His work demonstrates that building homes isn’t just about concrete and contracts—it’s about creating equity, opportunity and resilience for communities in need.