Rebecca Parrell
Title: Senior Project Coordinator
Organization: City of Minneapolis
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Since 2006, Rebecca Parrell has worked in Economic Development for the City of Minneapolis. In her role as a Senior Project Coordinator she manages the City’s Great Streets Program and various real estate projects. The Great Streets Program provides Façade Improvement Matching Grants to businesses and property owners, grants to business district non-profit organizations engaged in commercial revitalization, and CDBG gap loans to catalytic real estate redevelopment projects. Through her Great Streets work, Rebecca collaborates as a trusted partner with grantees to refine and develop appropriate approaches to address the unique revitalization and stabilization needs of the city’s neighborhood business districts.
Two examples of complex real estate projects she has worked on include the rehabilitation of an historic Sears building into a mixed-use development and a downtown mixed-use development with affordable housing, market-rate housing, storefront commercial, parking deck, and new City fire station. Rebecca has experience achieving City goals through challenging commercial real estate development projects – balancing public and private needs, economic realities, community desires, and political pressures. She has worked on projects with funding stacks using New Markets Tax Credits, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, public grants, federal loan dollars, subordinate debt, and more. Rebecca is working together with colleagues to undo Minneapolis’s worst planning mistake – a ten-acre building and parking lot blocking a major north/south arterial with a suburban-style Kmart development from 1977.
Rebecca is an Urban Studies graduate of Augsburg College in Minneapolis and Master of Regional Planning graduate from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.