Joanne Carras

Major Career Highlights:

• Assistant Deputy Mayor | Economic Development
• Program Manager | FDIC
• Executive Genesis L.A. Economic Growth Corporation
• Council Member L.A. County Castaic Area Town Council

As a real estate and finance executive with over 43 years in the public and private sectors, Ms. Carras has developed, implemented and managed programs, and supervised and mentored teams with great success in all areas of real estate development and finance. Her areas of expertise are extensive with respect to real estate acquisition, leasing, management, negotiating agreements, financial modeling, grant management, real property master planning, oversight of building design and operations, redevelopment, historic preservation and adaptation, environmental remediation, infrastructure planning, construction management and facilitating sustainability while executing creative financing strategies.

With over 15 years in the public sector, elected as a council member to serve Los Angeles County and appointed in Federal and municipal positions, she has gained unparalleled expertise in the public process and access to public resources making her uniquely qualified to successfully foster and execute public-private partnerships [P3] stimulating economic development and sustainable economic growth for marginalized communities. Her approach incorporates transparency, equity and inclusion which always results in garnishing consensus for a win-win results.

Her creative concepts and strategies have been shared and modeled by numerous non-profit organizations and communities throughout the country. Her passion to facilitate development in economically challenged communities has resulted in millions of square feet of urban infill development valued in excess of $3 Billion in housing and commercial development. Her creative concepts and strategies have been shared and modeled by numerous non-profit organizations and communities throughout the country. Her passion to facilitate development in economically challenged communities has resulted in millions of square feet of urban infill development valued in excess of $3 Billion in housing and commercial development.

In 1983, she expanded her professional career by obtaining her real estate license the State of Arizona and subsequently in the State of California.
She has since rehabilitated and developed from ground up over 1,550 housing units, including multifamily, affordable, student and SFR’s many of which have been catalytic housing within mixed use transit developments. She is an expert in securing public subsidies, gap funding and other resources that leverage higher investor returns. From preparation of development budgets, cash flow projections and operating budgets tied to feasible designs and construction costs, given her unparalleled expertise in feasibility analysis and negotiating development agreements since she has sat on both sides of the table for over 40 years.

She has overseen millions of square feet of construction of projects from one custom residence to a 60-acre master planned community having negotiated over billions of dollars in financial agreements and managed over millions of square feet of all industry type assets nationwide. She understands the entitlement process and is very savvy when it comes to negotiating land use and master planning to achieve the double bottom line.

With a passion to pursue a career in government, she earned a management position at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 1989. Among many responsibilities at the FDIC, she was instrumental in creating and implementing many successful programs which included the disposition of $6 billion worth of environmentally impaired assets in a few years. She developed numerous environmentally sensitive properties throughout her career applying her technical knowledge and education to recycle landfills securing governmental approvals to redevelop. In 1999, Ms. Carras was recruited by the Mayor, City of Los Angeles as Assistant Deputy Mayor, after serving ten (10) years at the FDIC in Phoenix, Chicago and Washington D.C.

During her tenure with the City, she served as the city’s expert for public funding. Directly responsible for executing economic development investments city-wide, Carras supervised the LA Business Team and executed the unique ability to bridge the business and financial gaps between the private and public sectors. Routinely interfacing with a myriad of government agencies, she successfully achieved the mission by negotiating public-private partnerships [P3] to influence over $1.5 billion of private investment in the city’s most neglected areas by implementing creative economic development initiatives. She was responsible for securing the funding of projects that were catalytic and which stimulated economic growth that had not been experienced in decades.

Within a 2 year period at the Mayor’s Office, she leveraged public subsidies to close financial gaps by enticing private investment in projects that would not have otherwise come to fruition without her skill to build consensus and garnish unanimous support for the projects she directly managed. With her unique strategies leveraging public assets to entice private investment, she was tasked to serve on the team that created several successful private investment funds raising over $270 million and earning mid-to-high teen returns.

Ms. Carras is one of the founding members and CFO of a woman owned-managed construction company, licensed in California and has managed a myriad of construction projects since 1983. She also founded a minority woman owned-managed consulting firm in 2001, where she has served as Managing Partner and CFO since 2003.

In 1977 she became entrenched in her family’s hospitality business which instilled a foundation for a high work ethic given the values she gained from her immigrant family that came to the United States from Greece after the ravaging of her family home by Germany in WWII. By 1979, she proudly became one of the first licensed restaurant managers in Illinois and graduated with honors from high school, a significant achievement for a first generation immigrant who attended college at night and high school during the day to be the first in her family to earn a college degree.

She has been invited to speak in myriad of forums as a subject matter expert. She lives in southern California with her husband and is the proud mom of an NYU freshman following in her footsteps.