"Minneapolis has a surprisingly simple plan to cut traffic and make housing more affordable."

It's my firm belief that business owners in downtown New Albany would benefit more from exploring territories lying outside the usual boxes, with parking policies being an excellent case in point, than continuing the traditional and largely failed pattern of trusting City Hall to do their thinking for them.

"Why free parking is bad for everyone" at NAC (June, 2014)

... To cities where he serves as a parking consultant, Shoup's recommendation is simple. "Charge the right price for on-street parking," he says. "I see this as the lowest price you can charge and still have one or two open spaces per block." This means the market sets the price — and people are paying as little as possible for parking without creating the cruising problem.

Each day, the city enforces parking ordinances outside of downtown but not in the historic business district, apparently from a misguided belief that "free" parking is necessary for independent small business advancement. It's simply poisonous to arbitrarily enforce one set of laws and not another, especially when the premise of parking as being valueless is what prefaces many of the current problems with abuse.

A second article explores reasons why parking space requirements negatively impact affordable housing.

Minneapolis has a surprisingly simple plan to cut traffic and make housing more affordable, by Joseph Stromberg (Vox)

 ... "The worst thing that many American cities have done, for low-income people, is create a world in which you need a car," retired UCLA economist Donald Shoup told me in an interview last year. "Parking pushes everything farther apart, and even if you're too poor to own a car, you have to pay for all the free parking you don't use."