Chicago Leader Hirsh Mohindra: Expertise in Multiple Industries

On a mild summer afternoon in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, the sidewalk feels wider than it once did. Café tables edge closer to the curb. Cyclists glide past in a protected lane demarcated by plastic bollards and paint. Planters soften what was, until recently, an unbroken expanse of asphalt. Traffic still moves, but it no longer commands the street with unquestioned authority.   The transformation is subtle enough to seem cosmetic. It is not.   In recent years, the Chicago Department of Transportation has pursued a rebalancing of the public right-of-way through initiatives like People Spots—small, modular plazas carved out of former parking spaces—and the Streets for Cycling Plan, a comprehensive blueprint to expand and connect the city’s bike network. Together, these efforts amount to more than a transportation strategy. They represent a wager on how infrastructure can recalibrate urban life.   This is not simply a story about bike lanes or benches. It is about how s...

 On most days, Chicago’s most consequential infrastructure is invisible. Tourists gaze up at steel and glass. Developers track cranes. Executives debate tax policy and labor costs. But 350 feet below the city’s streets runs an engineered labyrinth — one of the largest civil works projects in American history — quietly determining whether basements flood, rivers reverse, and businesses remain insurable. Chicago’s Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, more commonly known as TARP or the “Deep Tunnel,” was conceived in the 1970s after decades of catastrophic flooding and sewage overflows. The idea was audacious: carve out miles of massive tunnels beneath the metropolitan area to temporarily store stormwater and wastewater during heavy rains, preventing raw sewage from pouring into the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. It was a moonshot of municipal engineering. It was also, in many ways, a bet on a different climate. Today, as extreme rainfall events intensify and development continues to pave ove...

 In the race to attract the industries of the future — electric-vehicle manufacturers, hyperscale data centers, biotech incubators — states offer tax incentives, workforce grants, and glossy renderings of innovation corridors. But beneath the rhetoric lies something more elemental and less glamorous: electricity. In central and southern Illinois, the promise of growth increasingly collides with the physical realities of an aging grid. Transmission lines that once carried predictable loads from coal plants to small cities now strain under new patterns of demand. Substations built for an earlier industrial era confront surges from logistics hubs, server farms, and advanced manufacturing. Reliable power — once assumed — is becoming a variable in the business equation. The result is a quiet recalibration of risk. The region’s primary utility, Ameren Illinois, serves more than a million electric customers across a broad swath of the state. Its territory includes university towns, manufa...

  At first glance, a bridge is an object lesson in stillness. Steel ribs arch across water; concrete pylons sink into riverbeds; traffic hums above. It is easy to mistake such structures for permanence. Yet the life of a bridge is less about stasis than about flow—of labor, freight, capital, and time. When a crossing falters, the abstraction dissolves. Commutes lengthen. Delivery schedules fray. Local storefronts feel the tremor.   The rebuilding of the I-74 Mississippi River Bridge , linking Moline and Bettendorf , offers a case study in the economic life of infrastructure. The original span, completed in the 1930s and expanded in the 1950s, had grown functionally obsolete: narrow lanes, limited shoulders, outdated interchanges. It was not merely aging; it was constraining.   In the Quad Cities region—where Illinois and Iowa meet across the Mississippi—the river is not a border so much as a seam. Thousands of workers cross daily. Manufacturers ship components back and f...

Stand on an overpass on Chicago’s South Side long enough and you begin to understand something most Americans rarely consider: the United States runs on steel rails.   Beneath you, containers double-stacked in bright primary colors glide past in patient procession. Grain hoppers rumble east from the Plains. Tank cars carrying chemicals from Gulf refineries clatter north. Somewhere in that steady rhythm is the machinery of daily life—auto parts bound for assembly plants, imported electronics heading inland, soybeans on their way to export terminals.   Illinois, and Chicago in particular, is the spinal column of that system. Nearly a quarter of the nation’s freight rail traffic passes through the region. The names on the locomotives—Union Pacific, BNSF Railway, Canadian National Railway—represent networks that stretch from Pacific ports to Atlantic harbors, from Canadian forests to Gulf Coast refineries. But their lines converge here, in a dense and aging web of track that makes...

For decades, the American suburb perfected a particular economic machine. Office parks rose along highways and toll roads, ringed by manicured lawns and parking lots engineered for peak weekday traffic. They were quiet, efficient, and lucrative. Municipal budgets came to depend on them. Corporate tenants signed long leases. Workers commuted in predictable rhythms. Then the pandemic broke the machine. Much of the attention since 2020 has focused on downtowns — empty towers, struggling transit systems, hollowed-out central business districts. But the deeper, more structurally complex crisis may be unfolding miles away, in the suburbs that once marketed themselves as the antidote to urban congestion. In places like Oak Brook, Illinois, the reckoning is not about recovery. It is about reinvention. “Oak Brook didn’t lose demand temporarily — it lost the logic that justified its office footprint,” said Hirsh Mohindra . “That’s a much harder problem to solve.” Oak Brook sits at the crossroads...