DuComb said the city’s hands-off attitude in SODO “helped keep manufacturing and industrial lands cheap.”

“It helped keep jobs and an economic workforce base affordable,” she said. "Parking is affordable — it’s still free.

“But with the pressure of more people coming in, and more people coming in, and more people coming in, people don’t have the same elbow room they used to have.”

The influx of people naturally escalated the demand for parking. Commuters fought for the right to occupy the public rights of way — particularly behind Opitz’s building, which is across First Avenue from Starbucks’ headquarters. After Opitz towed a couple of cars and their owners complained, SDOT in 2006 sent its first warning letter to her. They continued intermittently about every 18 months, she said, until the notice of a daily fine came in 2015.

“We heard complaints [from motorists] of either not being able to access those areas or getting notes on their cars and things like that,” Estey said of SDOT’s efforts in the mid-2000s to step up its parking regulations in SODO.

Although those efforts, in some ways, appear to run counter to other city attempts to promote local business, particularly in Seattle’s arts and music scene, Estey insists SDOT has been accommodating to SODO’s businesses.

But when asked about the continued frustrations SODO property owners told Crosscut they continue to voice to the city, Estey downplayed the existence of the complaints. “I’m not aware of a lot of consternation out there,” he told Crosscut last week. “I feel like we’ve had lot of success, meeting the needs of property owners and installing signs.”

In February 2017, more than 30 SODO businesses — spearheaded by Opitz — co-signed a letter sent to then-Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and Councilmember Bruce Harrell in the hopes of getting the city’s top brass to intervene in the neighborhood’s conflict with SDOT. “SDOT is harming us all and forcing us to consider relocating to other cities,” the business owners wrote.

February 2017 letter from SODO businesses to City Hall

From the city, they received “no response. Crickets,” Opitz said, although she added that Harrell’s office has been “very receptive” in conversations. Current Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan also was apprised of the neighborhood’s problems during a campaign stop last fall before she was elected, SODO business owners said. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.

Tales of confusing signage, inconsistent enforcement

Estey said he couldn’t comment on Opitz’s situation specifically, because her legal fight with the city is still pending on appeal. But he emphasized: “We continue to have a willingness to work with any of the businesses out there with whatever parking signs, restrictions, loading signs that are out there, whatever might fit their needs.”

But business owners tell an opposite story, complaining of a city bureaucracy tone-deaf and insensitive to their needs.

The city has offered a variety of short-term parking and load-only signs to businesses to accommodate their loading zones, which aren’t supposed to be obstructed by public parking.

In an example of the sometimes contradictory parking signage that exists in Seattle's SODO neighborhood, a loading door at a U-Haul store warns motorists not to block access, but a sign posted by the City of Seattle says parking there is OK. (Photo by Kristen M. Clark/Crosscut)

But the placement of some parking signs in the neighborhood are confusing or even blatantly contradictory. Outside a U-Haul store that abuts Occidental, for example, the business has painted on its loading doors warnings of “no parking” to ensure access, but mere inches away is posted a city sign indicating the area is available for public parking. Only the city sign carries any legal authority.

Several business owners said the signage the city offers isn’t workable and parking rules are sometimes not enforced consistently. They complain, for instance, that commuters or short-term guests park in the loading areas illegally and get no tickets, only to have the businesses' own trucks ticketed by Seattle police if they go over posted time limits during routine deliveries.

“It was always really frustrating that they wouldn’t let us park behind the business,” said Watson, the former manager at Carpet To Go. “If we didn’t keep the ‘no parking’ signs up, anybody would come and park there and park in our doorway, and then the delivery trucks couldn’t get in.”

Wick, whose architectural woodworking business abuts Utah Avenue in the rear, volunteered similar frustrations.

“I’ve been told that the only way I can secure that space [behind my business] is to put a ‘load-zone only’ sign, but then not I’m allowed to park my vans back there at all. They would be subject to tickets, and you never know when they’re going to ticket,” she said.

Wick said her business received “nasty letters” from the city on two occasions: once when the business obstructed its adjacent right of way with large carts to prevent the public from parking there, and another time when they put an orange cone in front of their fire-escape door to prevent parked cars from blocking it for safety reasons.

“In both cases, we tried to be fairly compliant, but now I say, ‘too bad, I’m going to do it anyway,’ ” she said. “We have to be able to access our doors.”