MINNEAPOLIS (WJON News) — It will be a celebration of everything purple this week in Minneapolis. The city will once again hold a Prince Celebration from Wednesday through Sunday.

Chaka Khan will help kick off the festivities at First Avenue on Wednesday night.

The five-day festival will have a wide array of things to do and see.  There is a Prince Sing-Along at the Celebration Block Party on Saturday. Fans can walk the purple way with the second annual Purple Path, which is a city-wide tribute with eight temporary sidewalk clings marking significant sites tied to the artist.

The goal of the sing-along is to have 15,000 people singing arm-in-arm.

Plus, at the Meet Minneapolis Visitor Center, you can check out a replica of the motorcycle used in the 1984 movie “Purple Rain,” a five-foot-tall exact replica of the “cloud shoe” worn by Prince in the music video for “Raspberry Beret,” and paintings by Peyton Scott Russel.

Morris Day, Tevin Campbell, and more will play a concert at The Armory on Friday night.

There will also be walking tours, appearances by Prince’s bands the Revolution and the New Power Generation, and a Prince night at the Twins’ game on Thursday.

Purple Path map, Prince Celebration 2026

READ MORE FROM AUTHOR PAUL HABSTRITT

New York City has gone YIMBY.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced his new housing plan on May 26, with an agenda to build 200,000 new affordable homes, convert existing hotels and office buildings into low-cost apartments, and support the city’s tenants against “bad landlords.” He has endeared himself to the pro-housing, “yes in my backyard” cohort.

The scale of the mayor’s affordable housing plans is ambitious, especially for a city as populous and expensive as New York. But City Hall has some tangible inspiration. As Mamdani repeated in a series of press conferences this week, NYC needs to be more like Austin and Minneapolis. Seattle, Vienna, and Auckland also got honorable mentions.

What these cities have in common is fewer zoning regulations and more housing investment from local governments. One of the biggest drivers of skyrocketing housing costs in New York and cities across the country is simple supply and demand: There isn’t enough housing for everyone who wants it, allowing home sellers and landlords to hike prices for scarce goods. Some cities that built big have seen rent and home price growth slow or even reverse. Mamdani and pro-building advocates hope that the same can happen in the Big Apple.

“Let the lessons other cities have learned guide our future,” the mayor said to a crowd in Astoria, Queens. “Let our size be our strength. Let us implement these policies at scale. Let the largest city in the nation deliver the largest housing transformation this country has ever seen.”

Other cities show that increased housing supply lowers cost

Other big cities — both in the US and internationally — have tried similar strategies to boost housing access. Mamdani has pointed to the success of Minneapolis’ “2040 plan,” which focused on growing housing supply with new, denser builds and increased options for low- and middle-income residents. A paper by researchers at Middlebury College estimated that rents and home prices in the Twin City were 17% to 34% lower than they would have been without the reforms.

Austin successfully lowered median rents by 18.2% between their 2022 peak and 2026 — a difference of $302 per month, a Realtor.com report found. The key reason was an increase in supply coupled with slowing demand: The city invested in building more homes, and migration to Austin dipped compared to COVID-era highs.

Seattle, meanwhile, made zoning reforms to encourage affordable housing and protect tenants. Vienna heavily subsidizes more than half of the city’s housing supply, keeping rents low. And Auckland passed legislation to make it easier to build homes and invest in urban infrastructure.

Nikolai Fedak, president and founder of the organization New York YIMBY, told Business Insider that Mamdani’s plan is “an excellent first step” to address the housing crisis, and he would like to see the mayor push more market-rate development in neighborhoods with easy access to train and bus lines.

“It is fantastic to see a Mayor begin to embrace the reality of supply and demand curves but we have much farther to go,” he said. “And the best and easiest step to make this happen would be razing and replacing neighborhoods of single-family mansions sitting on some of the most valuable and transit-accessible real estate in the entire country.”

Mamdani has committed billions of dollars to increase NYC’s housing supply, which may help meet demand and encourage more affordable rents. His plan to freeze the rent on the 44% of the city’s apartments that are stabilized, however, risks pushing up prices for unstabilized units. St. Paul tried something similar, and one study found that the policy largely cut costs more for higher-income renters, and the rent control was eventually walked back in favor of building new homes.

Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Groundwork Collaborative, told Business Insider that Mamdani’s plan “centers around one goal: growth,” and the success of these housing projects depends on buy-in from the public and private sectors. Cutting outdated regulations is a good start, he said.

Realtor.com Senior Economist Jake Krimmel — a NYC resident himself — added that he appreciates Mamdani’s “yes, and” approach to housing, and said that the mayor has done a solid job with policies that both incentivize developers to build more affordably and appeal to the YIMBY contingent: “To thread that needle is difficult,” he said.

Building large-scale affordable housing is a heavy lift. There are funding hurdles at both the City Council and state level, alongside longstanding zoning restrictions that can prevent new construction or the conversion of existing commercial buildings. In NYC, where half of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing, it’s also challenging to make that housing accessible.

The recent overturning of a longtime state cap on home construction in NYC will allow more homes to be built, City Hall has said, and the mayor is working with the state and federal government to ensure future funding for housing projects. The administration also plans to build dense housing on property the city already owns, reducing some cost and regulatory barriers.

“New York City will build,” Mamdani said. “And then New York City will build some more.”