In the spring of 2017, Debra Parker — a longtime Chicago public housing tenant activist from the South Side — and her boyfriend Charles Bell met at a Dunkin Donuts on 79th Street and Cicero Avenue for a board meeting of a new janitorial business: Parks and Bell Cleaning Co.
Bell owned the company, public records show. But he made only $3,000 from Parks and Bell during the previous year, and the fledgling business paid Parker even less — just $800 in 2016.
During that board meeting on April 2, 2017, though, “It was discussed that Parks and Bell will seek new contract opportunities,” according to meeting minutes.
The fortunes of Parks and Bell improved quickly and dramatically. Soon, it was one of three companies with ties to Parker that saw their business with the Chicago Housing Authority boom — with most of the payments from the government agency coming since Parker became a CHA board member in 2018.
Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel nominated Parker for the CHA board, touting her as the first participant in the agency’s housing-choice voucher program to help oversee the agency.
A few months after her appointment to the CHA board, Parker resigned from the Parks and Bell board, and hasn’t voted on board measures related to the company.
Still, Parks and Bell saw its business with the agency skyrocket in the coming years, from revenues of $30,000 in 2015 to more than $1.4 million from the CHA last year, a WBEZ investigation has found.
And two other companies owned by Parker’s close family members also have had lucrative dealings with the CHA since she became a commissioner seven years ago.
Records provided by the CHA in response to public records requests shows the agency has paid a combined total of nearly $22 million to Parks and Bell and two other companies owned by Parker’s family members:
- Ryan’s Cleaning Services Inc., owned by the commissioner’s sister Angela Parker, has been paid more than $15 million by the CHA. As with Parks and Bell, about 90% of the housing authority’s payments to Angela Parker’s company have come during the time Debra Parker has been on the CHA board.
- A company owned by Debra Parker’s daughter Lovie Diggs, founded in 2020, has been paid more than $1 million by the CHA in its first five years in business.
Diggs’ company, Lavi Decor and Cleaning Co., has continued to do business with the agency even after her arrest and indictment for identity theft in 2023. Diggs denied committing identity theft but pleaded guilty to a lesser, misdemeanor charge, according to court records.
Asked about her boyfriend, sister and daughter’s business with the CHA, the commissioner says she and other board members had nothing to do with their success because agency employees decide who gets work from the housing authority.
She says board members set policy but “don’t give out contracts.”
“I have no direct authority,” Parker says of the deals her boyfriend and family members got. “Do they have a right to participate in contracts and opportunities in a free country? I think they do. They have the same right as every individual who is a U.S. citizen.”
Parker says she received “ethics advice” on the matter but would not show any documents that reflect any legal opinions she was given.
Parker says her motivation in serving as a commissioner was unselfish: “I’m trying to be a voice for people who don’t have a voice.”
Parker’s sister and boyfriend say they haven’t benefited from their ties to the commissioner.
“Everything I got from CHA, Commissioner Parker had nothing to do with it,” Bell says.
A spokesman for the CHA won’t talk about Debra Parker or the agency’s deals with her boyfriend and family members.
This comes as Mayor Brandon Johnson’s selection of former Ald. Walter Burnett to head the agency has been delayed. The Chicago Sun-Times reported last month that Burnett and his wife Darlena Williams-Burnett have been paid more than $260,000 as housing voucher landlords for the CHA, with two ongoing contracts and five that were active during Williams-Burnett’s eight years as an agency employee, ending in 2022.
The voucher payments to Burnett and his wife raise questions about potential conflicts of interest, according to the CHA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD has required the CHA to seek conflict waivers.
Internal probe spotlights commissioner’s sister
The issue of insider contracts at the nation’s third-largest housing authority also came up at the CHA’s last public board meeting, on Sept. 19 — and it was raised by Angela Parker, who said she had been unfairly investigated by the CHA’s inspector general due to her sister’s position as a board member.
With Debra Parker sitting among the other commissioners, Angela Parker took the microphone during the public comment portion of the meeting, saying, “I’m here today just to express my profound concern regarding an investigation that was made upon me with the inspector general’s office, and I truly believe that I’m being targeted because my sister — she’s a commissioner.”
Angela Parker did not say how she knew she was being investigated or anything about the accusations she said she faced. But she denied any wrongdoing and said she deserved the business her company has gotten from the CHA.
Referring to her sister, Angela Parker said, “We do have separate relationships, and I don’t think that the work that Ryan’s does should have anything to do with anything else going on because we only receive our work through proper means. We’ve never done anything unethical or anything like that.”
Angela Parker told the CHA board it has a “fiduciary duty” to ensure that the inspector general’s office treats her company fairly.
Kathryn Richards, the CHA’s inspector general, won’t comment.
Angela Parker’s company was founded in 2009. It has seen its revenues from the CHA rise dramatically in recent years. The CHA has paid the company a total of $15.1 million. Ryan’s Cleaning revenues from the CHA peaked at more than $3.5 million in 2023 but declined sharply last year.
Like her sister, Angela Parker once was a resident of Altgeld Gardens, a CHA housing development that became notorious for the environmental hazards in its industrial neighborhood on the Far South Side.
In 2018, as Ryan’s Cleaning’s business with the CHA began to soar, property records show Angela Parker bought a five-bedroom, five-bath, 4,000-square-foot house in Mokena.
Reached by phone, Angela Parker declined an interview request.
The rise of Parks and Bell
Parks and Bell has been even more reliant on CHA deals for its revenue than Ryan’s Cleaning.
And records from the CHA, the city of Chicago and the state show Debra Parker played a role in Parks and Bell during the company’s first years in business. Parker’s daughter and son also have been employees of Parks and Bell.
In filing as a minority-owned businessman eligible for contract set-aside programs, Bell, who is Black, told Chicago city officials in 2017 that he was responsible for most of the company’s management responsibilities but that Parker was in charge of 80% of Parks and Bell’s marketing and sales operations and did 20% of the company’s estimating and check-signing.
Parker was the company’s secretary at its first board meeting in 2016, with an organizational chart for Parks and Bell listing her also as the firm’s “document specialist.”
Parker was paid $5,000 to consult for the company in 2015, the year it was incorporated, and has disclosed that she continued to work as a consultant for Parks and Bell in 2018.
Parks and Bell also hired Parker’s daughter in May 2017, records show.
The company grossed only $30,000 in 2015 and $50,000 the following year, Bell told city officials. In 2017, Parks and Bell’s biggest deal was a $111,000 contract for cleaning bathrooms and pantries at 60 E. Van Buren St. — the CHA headquarters.
The next year, in June 2018, Emanuel nominated Parker to the CHA board. The mayor’s office pointed to her extensive experience working for the housing authority as a counselor for teenage mothers and as a longtime tenant leader at Altgeld Gardens and in the housing-voucher program. The Chicago City Council unanimously approved her appointment, and she attended her first meeting as a CHA commissioner in July 2018.
In her “candidate questionnaire” for the appointment to the board, Parker described her business relationship with Parks and Bell, saying she had “interacted with mentors and the training facilitators at the CHA” on behalf of the company. She also wrote: “I have never discussed any contract agreements with the CHA.” Bell did that, according to Parker.
Four months after her appointment, in November 2018, Parker resigned from the other board she served on — as corporate secretary of Parks and Bell. In a letter given to CHA officials, Parker wrote to Bell that she had to choose between the two positions because Parks and Bell was an agency vendor.
“It is with regret that I tender my resignation with Parks and Bell Cleaning Company as Corporate Secretary,” Parker wrote. “However, I recently accepted a volunteer position with the City of Chicago, to serve as a Chicago Housing Authority Commissioner, so I humbly choose the position as commissioner in order to make a difference in the lives of thousands of residents regarding housing needs.”
Since the company went into business, payments from the housing authority have accounted for 98% of its gross receipts, according to CHA records and minority-business disclosure filings from Parks and Bell with City Hall.
Bell ‘about ready to get rid of’ Parker
Still, Bell says he believes the CHA recently has treated his company poorly because Parker is his girlfriend and that the issue has caused friction in their relationship.
“I’m about ready to get rid of her over the way they treat me,” Bell says.
He says his company does good janitorial work and also has rehabilitated public housing units that become vacant for new tenants.
“I work for everything that I’ve got from [the CHA] because I do quality work, and they were calling me because I do the work fast and quick,” he says.
Bell says he has faced an investigation by the CHA inspector general but has done nothing wrong. His lawyer Gery Chico, a former Chicago Board of Education president and mayoral candidate, wouldn’t comment.
Parker has recused herself or abstained five times when measures affecting companies tied to her boyfriend or relatives have come before the CHA board. In May 2023, when the board increased the amount the agency could pay a group of vendors, Parker said, “Due to family association, I am recusing myself from discussion and voting on this matter.”
In 2021, when Mayor Lori Lightfoot reappointed her, Parker again mentioned Parks and Bell in her candidate questionnaire but said she had “discontinued all professional relationships with the company” when she resigned as corporate secretary three years earlier.
Parker wrote, “To date, I have no role with Parks and Bell, therefore there is no conflict of interest or appearance of impropriety.”
According to the CHA’s ethics policy: “An actual conflict of interest need not exist to constitute a violation of the Policy. Activities that create the appearance of conflict of interest must also be avoided.”
Records show Parker’s two children continued to work for Parks and Bell after she left the company and joined the CHA board. Her daughter and Parker’s son Wilbert Moore worked for Parks and Bell, cleaning CHA headquarters during the coronavirus pandemic.
The company has continued to employ Moore, Bell says, describing himself as a mentor to his girlfriend’s son.
Lovie Diggs started her own business five years ago at her mother’s home address, in the Southwest Side Scottsdale neighborhood. Lavi Decor landed CHA business in 2021. Agency records show it paid the company more than $457,000 in 2023, though those revenues have fallen in the last year and a half.
Court records show Diggs was arrested by the Chicago police in February 2023 and indicted by a Cook County grand jury for allegedly using another woman’s identity to steal more than $5,000 from the Bob’s Discount Furniture store in Calumet City. The case ended last year with a guilty plea for disorderly conduct, a year of probation and an order to stay away from the store.
Responding to questions from a reporter, Diggs writes, “I was [a] victim of mistaken identity in that case.” She did not answer questions about her company’s business with the CHA.
Parker and Bell tour River North luxury apartment
Parker remains a CHA voucher-holder, according to her financial disclosure statement this year. The voucher program, widely known as Section 8, is the nation’s primary subsidized-housing initiative, with public housing authorities typically covering 70% of the rent for low-income residents who live in privately owned housing.
Though Parker has a housing voucher, CHA emails provided in response to a public records request indicate that she and her boyfriend toured and applied to rent a market-rate unit in a luxury high-rise in River North in 2023. In an October 2023 email to Parker’s CHA email address, a leasing agent or the building wrote: “Hi Charles and Deborah [sic], Thank you both so much for coming in to tour yesterday and for your application.” Someone else applied for the apartment they toured, the agent wrote, “but I’m so relieved that there are other options for you guys.”
The agent offered Parker and Bell a 12-month lease for about $4,000 a month.
The building management asked for and received “proof of income” and other financial statements for Bell and Parker’s son before approving the application, the emails show. In one message, an agent who worked to broker the rental deal wrote, “Charles is the business owner and pays himself a smaller salary for tax purposes. So, ideally, we’d expect that the business and personal accounts would be combined for the approval.”
A WBEZ reporter trying to interview Parker left a business card for her and Bell with the building’s doorman. Minutes later, she called back. But Parker and Bell said they do not live together and that only Bell lives in the apartment near downtown.
Contributing: Lizzie Kane