carol: carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." me carol. -- i'm carol massar. jason: we're headed inside bloomberg headquarters in new york. carol: it is all about cities, including some home prices, great for some and not for others. we take a look at affordable housing. jason: and the world's first 5g

broadband network is going to bring everything to your phone a lot faster. they may transform the places you live. carol: all of that coming up and more as we take you to this very special edition of bloomberg businessweek. jason: we begin with one city busy this week. congress is back from summer break. hearings on everything from social media to a supreme court nominee. carol: steven dennis joins us to wrap up the week. let's start with those hearings of brett kavanaugh. steven: a lot of fireworks inside the hearing room. democrats trying to bore in on the question of whether he would overturn roe versus wade and give the president a pass when it comes to subpoenas on things like the mueller investigation. a lot of protesters interesting with cries about abortion or health care or other hot topic issues. kavanaugh kept his cool.

did not really answer the questions. unlike a lot of supreme court nominees before him, he would not rule out or rule in overturning roe versus weight, wade, the keysus abortion decision hanging over all of these proceedings. it is the reason why you have people dressed in "handmaid's tale" protesting outside the hearing room. the democrats are upset there have been millions of documents that have been kept from the public. they are threatening to release some of them. you have a lot of fights, but it does not necessarily mean he is in trouble for confirmation. no republican has come out against him. just one set of important hearings but another set of hearings involving jack dorsey of twitter

and sheryl sandberg, coo at facebook. google officials were missing in washington. but they were answering questions about bias posts on social media and meddling in the election. what is our takeaway? steven: these companies still have a huge amount of work to do. it is not clear they have a handle on these problems. they have both kind of admitted that, especially dorsey. he does not have the resources of facebook, which is hiring 20,000 people to work on security. that is more than twitter has in total employees. saying we need to write better algorithms to catch abuse. he got kind of embarrassed by lawmakers who were able to pull up tweets in real-time showing people trying to sell cocaine and other drugs on his service.

he had to do a lot of apologizing. it is going to be hard for twitter to scale up some of their solutions. twitter stock took a hit. jack dorsey was talking about massive shifts in how twitter operates and their incentives and business structure. he did not really get into too much detail as to how that was going to work. jason: we have to ask you about the drama at the other end of pennsylvania avenue. bob woodward's book leaked earlier in the week. there was an anonymous op-ed in the "new york times." what effect has that had on the white house? steven: the hits keep on coming for president trump, whether it be the omarosa book, the john

mccain week, all of his colleagues laying subtle and not-so-subtle attacks on the president, then this op-ed from someone inside his own administration saying they are part of a resistance to the president. you have seen the president lash out in public and on twitter. he attacked the jeff sessions on sunday for having his department indict two republicans. there has been a backlash on capitol hill against jeff sessions. it has been a perfect storm for the president. it seems like every week we are , getting more of this and coming closer to some kind of cataclysm, it seems. it does not feel like we are in anything close to stability before the election. jason: let us get into this

special issue of "bloomberg businessweek." it is all about cities. cities have to sell problems first to live up to their economic potential, pollution, noise, housing. so many- carol: problems and that is just a few of them. we check in with our editor for the thinking behind the story. max: our framework was the future, the sooner than you think cities issue, the framework we use to think about technology and where things are going. what i ended up focusing on was the idea that cities are really important. that is something everybody knows and we talk about their are these megacities growing really fast, economically. cities are grabbing ever greater shares, shares of population. that is creating all of these problems that are going to have to be managed. that is what gave the issue shape initially.

you have these tech hubs all around the world. this problem on top of that, which is housing. as these places grow, people cannot afford to live there. that is creating all sorts of interesting issues that are political and can slow down economic growth and hold these places back. we looked at that from two different ways. one is an essay that argues that a lot of these housing issues can be solved with political work. the second story is about seattle and the tech industry, particularly amazon. part dueat story is in to the framing you described. every mayor in every city in america had a plan for hq2. it is a sweepstakes of a lifetime or is perceived to be as such. deena lives in this neighborhood

that has been utterly transformed by amazon, and not just by amazon, but by a billionaire, paul allen. max: i followed the tech industry very closely and i did not know there was this neighborhood, south lake union, north of downtown. there is the regular downtown. i did not know how dramatic the change had been. this story started as a moody report about what things were like there. then, this other thing was going on which was, you have all of these mayors going to this neighborhood to check it out. it has become a developers valhalla. everyone wants to be like seattle. the truth is that people who

live there are not so sure. seattle is in this moment where it is at the height of its power, but there are all these questions. we decided to look at that. that paired with the essay about how to fix these things give us an interesting picture of how technology is changing cities and what the solutions are. jason: we have to talk about miami because that story is terrifying. terrifying is the only word that captures it. i have to think miami is not the only city experiencing these issues around climate change, but not the obvious ones. max: everybody thinks climate change is going to come from rising sea levels, and washing homes away. but the water is coming from below in miami. that is creating all sorts of genuinely terrifying problems that could put miami's drinking

water at risk. this story was originally a photo essay. we thought chris was going to work with the photographer and take beautiful pictures of water in miami. then, chris delivered a spectacular first draft that was edited and it is an amazing read, like a horror story, about the future. it points out the ways of this stuff can be fixed. as scary as this is for miami, it can be addressed, it would just be wildly expensive. jason: we turn to china where one city in china is dealing with congestion and a quiet environment all of a sudden. carol: of course you of heard of turning a no to yes to solve the affordable housing problem. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek."

carol: welcome back. jason: you can also find us online. carol: and on the mobile app. jason: we just heard about this story on miami. it was a big highlight, scary. carol: it talks about how water could swallow a quarter of miami by the end of the century. but there is a more immediate threat. jason: drinking water. chris: climate change is threatening one particular part of the miami infrastructure, and ability to provide drinking water to its population. if you lose that access to cheap drinking water, it is a real problem. you have expensive solutions, or you start to lose people.

these story looks at where those threats are coming from and what the answers might be. jason: everyone has this glamorous view of miami, whether it is south beach or the gleaming towers or miami vice. i am dating myself. you saw a very different side of miami. take us there. tell us what you saw. christopher: miami is a great town and those parts are real. but they are supported by an infrastructure of water in terms of providing water, moving water off the surface, that occurs out of sight. it is that infrastructure that is being tested and threatened by climate change. i took a trip with the number two at the county water and sewer department. his job is to think of what these threats are and how to deal with them. he took me to the systems that clean this water and pumping underground, and right where the

everglades begin, i visited something called the northwest wellfield. as saltwater moves in through aquifer, that saltwater will stay clean and fresh the longest. they wanted to show me they are aware of these threats and working on them. some of them do not have good answers. they do not know how long it will take for these climate threats to really push their drinking water supply. they have to plan for a timeline. the reason it is hard is the money involved is enormous, you're talking billions and billions of dollars to protect their infrastructure or build new infrastructure. when do they start trying to pay the cost of these upgrades, not knowing how soon these threats will hit? it is a dilemma cities will face but miami will hit that dilemma sooner than most. that is being impacted by

climate change. you talk about specific things. you talk about a superfund site, the toxins leaking in. talk to us about that. you also talk about the rock lake and mining and feces. jason: you took my line. carol: sorry. chris: in 2014, a pa put out a report saying of all the threats, one threat is that superfund sites and other industrial sites, as they have more flooding some of those , toxins held in the soil could escape from where they are held into the groundwater. miami is especially vulnerable, because you have a dozen or so superfund sites, much more

industrial the on that and you have got that very shallow groundwater. the concern in miami is that as flooding gets worse in terms of intensity and frequency, you could have more events where these toxins get pushed into the aquifer and tax the infrastructure to try and clean those toxins out of drinking water. i spoke with gina mccarthy and she said citizens in miami have to worry about this because you don't know whether climate change will increase the threat and how quickly. these are things of its cities struggle with. funding for water infrastructure is really expensive. there is less state and federal help than there used to be. you have got this financial pressure and this climate pressure that means you have to spend more even as funding goes down. jason: throughout this issue, we dispatch reporters to look at what the cities of tomorrow may look like.

carol: we do this often just by listening. zhen and howout shen it is getting a lot cleaner and quieter. >> we are seeing the arrival of electric buses, the first kind of technology taking noise out of a city environment. you would not hear a pin drop. it is a huge city with 20 million people and construction. imagine taking all of the sound out of the cars in new york and get the experience of what it is like. that is missing from the audio fabric of the city. carol: take us back to 1980, because i feel like that is where things began in terms of the development. aaron: this is not ancient history when you go back to the pre-automotive time. it was a collection of fishing villages and it was the creation

first special economic stone. it happened because of its proximity to hong kong. that was when hong kong was controlled by the british. use all over the space of a few years, the arrival of all kinds of modern infrastructure and transportation turn what was basically fishing villages into this huge megacity, where there is now 20 million people. the structure of the city is centered around this old village structure. a lot of people don't have cars, and it made it one of the user places for china to transform this way. jason: china transformed at a rate that is hard to imagine for the rest of the world. how did they make this pivot from electric to combustion? aaron: it was motivated by how

terrible the pollution conditions were. they created incentives to save themselves from the smog for consumers to buy electric vehicles and they used the state to push the transition forward. we have done finance. they are tracking the adoption of electric buses which is one of the main things that has changed. china accounts for 99% as of 2017 of all of the world's electric buses. shenzhen is a leading manufacturer, as well as the leading manufacturer of plug-in vehicles. carol: warren buffett has invested in them. they are a big player. aaron: they are huge in china. they are the manufacturer of these buses, five years ago were , treated as something of a laughingstock,

but are now transforming how people in china get around. every five weeks they make about , 9500 new electric buses the , size of the entire bus fleet of the city of london. you would be hard-pressed to find their stuff outside of china now, but they are using the support of the chinese government, and there is so much support for these vehicles in china as a way to internationalize. jason: coming up, cities that experience lots of growth, run into a lot of problems. one of them, housing. carol: there are ways to get home prices under control. this is "bloomberg businessweek."

jason: welcome back. meet jason. -- i am jason kelly.

carol: i'm carol massar. you can listen to us on the radio, sirius xm channel 119, in new york, boston, washington,ca: d.c. cities are great unless you are trying to find affordable housing. jason: it is one of the biggest problems that mayors and governors and heads of countries face. there are solutions out there. >> why is our housing crisis so incredibly expensive? the very places that most need new talent because they are engines of creativity for the u.s. and the world. why? there is not enough housing. everybody wants to live there. the solution is obvious, build more housing. there are all kinds of rules that restrict that from happening and those tend to be

put in place by the people already there and they lack the incentive to change the rules, because if there is more demand, they are going to be able to sell more. they benefit at the expense of everyone else. that includes local employers, that are starved for talent, and people from all over the rest of the country, even their children, who would like to live there and benefit from that engine of growth. jason: you have some pretty staggering statistics about the cost of living in some of these places, starting in silicon valley. this is a two bedroom, one bathroom, detached one car garage, no air-conditioning. 880 square feet. $1.575 million is the asking price. peter: if you are watching from silicon valley, you are thinking, what is the big deal? jason: what are the economic

implications? you are the master of the ripple effect. what happens in a place like silicon valley specifically when a house like that costs that much? peter: companies have to pay more to attract people so they do not go work in austin or someplace like that instead. that means they cannot afford to hire as many people. there are fewer opportunities for workers. it also inhibits their growth, to some extent. who wins? not the shareholders of facebook and google -- jason: it is whoever is selling that house. peter: it is a massive transfer of wealth to people who just happened to buy before the boom. carol: why are not municipalities pushing back a little bit and saying we need to do development? peter: some are.

it tends to be the ones that manage to get enlightened voters who see the upside outweighs the downside. i talked to the mayor of the heart of silicon valley. last december, he was vice mayor. mountain view put through a plan to build up to 10,000 units of housing right around the world headquarters of google, where it is very badly needed. it is not a residential area, or has not been until now. , i do not have local saying do not want more housing in my neighborhood. they are happy to have it there because it is not in their backyard. google wins the new people win , and the locals don't lose. jason: one place where housing has become an issue in seattle. there is a lot of talk about the amazon second headquarters. we go to seattle to see how they dealt with the carol: and south

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♪ jason: welcome back. carol: still ahead, much more on cities and the changes they could undergo in a 5g universe. jason: and one startup is devising new ways of mapping the world. carol: amazon is topping a $1 trillion market cap, only the second company to do so. apple being the jason: it is one

first. of the metrics that sums up the rise of amazon and jeff bezos. >> we have a terminal charge to show this and how cool it really is. apple was the first u.s. company to do that. it took them a pretty long time to get that last $200 billion. amazon, did not take them as long to do it. only a few months. now hovering right around the $1 trillion mark. jason: amazon has also made its mark on seattle, occupying some 8.1 million square feet in the city. this has changed the rental market there. taylor: it has affected the price per square foot. it has affected the retail and commercial industries. one city where amazon has made an impact is the lake union area, now more than $55 per square foot.

relative to other local business districts are around the $40-40 five dollar mark. amazon effect coming in everywhere. carol: taylor, thank you. amazon has led much of a change we see in seattle. what you probably don't know the other billionaire who helped build a section of that city. jason: one of our editors explain why a mayor is clamoring for amazon's second headquarters and why they should be careful what they wish for. >> seattle has undergone huge growth in the last decade. more than 100,000 people have moved fear -- here. seattle seems to be at the height of its power and prominence. when amazon asked for bids for their second headquarters, we had this real estate-economic

development tourist, crowding into lake union. what is so special and how could they reproduce it? but seattle is in a deeply uncomfortable moment. in the last couple of months, different situations have exploded into anger and thanks -- angst about the growth, who it is leaving behind. i tried it to look at these trade-offs and what is going on in our home city. jason: you have lived in this area for some time. what has that transformation been like in your neighborhood? dina: i moved here in 1999. what we looked at in particular because it is the focal point of all the growth. and the city is a neighborhood

called south lake union. it was built up by paul allen, the microsoft cofounder, and largely inhabited by amazon. but also there are a lot of google buildings are going up there right now, facebook, medical facilities. when i moved here, this was an out of favor neighborhood. no one went there, even though it was right near downtown. it had been a light industrial area. ford had built model t's there. in the 1990's and 1980's, it had become this pedestrian-free area of warehouses and floral supplies. laundromats. even though it was near downtown, people did not go there. it felt like a different world. if they went there, you did not walk because it was completely pedestrian unfriendly. that has changed. when you walk through the neighborhood now, it is full of mainly tech workers holding

their handbrewed coffee, rushing off to their jobs. it is full of office buildings, whole foods, trendy restaurants, craft cocktail emporiums. carol: and amazon has 8.1 million square feet, pretty amazing. dina: it is. when we talk about what it has done to the city, it has brought in more than 50,000 jobs, but on the flipside, it has caused a lot of disruption. you put in 40 or 50,000 workers and only build about 10,000 housing units. those people have to go somewhere. they have gone into all of these outlying neighborhoods. we have talked about the impact it has had on a particular neighborhood, a historically black neighborhood, where paul allen is now building a massive apartment and retail complex in a way the neighborhood is

finding very disruptive in a neighborhood that is already now below 20% in terms of the black population. you see alan mounting this next act of moving into other neighborhoods with residential and maybe neighbors are not happy about what is being done to the their neighborhoods -- to their neighborhoods. -- neighborhood. jason: so all of the places scrambling for this second headquarters, was this lightning in a bottle caught by two billionaires by accident? what should people take away from what they can do to make amazon happy? dina: what seattle folks say people should take away from this rapid expansion is to try and be a little more thoughtful. we spoke to the mayor that came up with the policies that enabled this, and he said, it would have been better for the city if the development had been

-- growth had been a little slower and if there had been better planning. you see amazon asked these company's competing cities, what will you do about traffic and housing? looking towards not having a repeat of the negative consequences. carol: seattle and silicon valley and beyond. the massive impact of technology around the cities 10 be seen around the globe. i don't think you can talk about the growth of technology in china without mentioning jack ma. jason: we got an exclusive sit down with him. he went from being an english teacher to a billionaire, one of the most influential voices in technology and business. he has set his sights on philanthropy now. jack: we have so much resources and talents in alibaba. 600 million people use us almost every month.

if we do not put the kind of , respect, responsibility into our business model, this giant alibaba could destroy a lot of things. do good things, do bad things. technology is cold, but you have to make the organization warm. people are warm. >> are you succeeding? jack: i said we should put 0.03% of the total alibaba revenue into the environment and education. nobody cared 10 years ago. we had no revenue. now we have such a big revenue. i said, we have to do this. >> in terms of technology, how

do you bring that to play in your mission for transforming education? jack: everything we have taught students at the past hundred years is about knowledge and science and industry. in the future, what we teach the kids is about innovation, creativity and construction. how can you do the things that machines cannot do? i am picking up a time about that. -- thinking all the time about that. i can be a teacher and a mentor to many young educators. i am very successful on life, though i don't call myself a successful and jupiter. i have gone through a lot of tough days. this is very good for young peo ple. -- people. i am not good at teaching math. english, his notice. -- business. i will teach young people have

to face challenges. communicate with your house dust cap parts in west, can you help divides? jack: i think it will. people in china and america have the heart of love and respect and trust. this is the common language we should have. the first technology revolution, close to world war i and world war ii. now we have the third. if there is a war, the war should fight against poverty and disease. we should work together on common things. it is easy to complain and finger point. if we work together, it is an opportunity for all of us. that is something i hope i can

do. jason: we head over to europe. again changing company is telling us forget. carol: and we know there are things you don't like about living in cities, but we are on it. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

♪ jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." carol: you can find us online. jason: and our mobile app. as we have seen cities are , laboratories for innovation. carol: some of this is about common sense. jason: our reporter brought us two stories. the first is about nuisances everyone is familiar with. >> garbage takes up a lot of space.

in new york city, it takes up space and attracts rodents. it is smelly. it is bad in every way. some cities have been doing innovative things with the way they are dealing with trash, and how they are putting it underground, creating smart systems that are connected underneath the sidewalk, with smaller bins above the service connected to technology that tells them if the bins are full and what time of day to be collected. this is big and portugal. euro: all i can think of is walt disney. fantastic?that sound jason: especially during august in new york. dimitra: the company that did it in portugal has been doing a lot of work in israel. several cities have the system.

beirut introduced a similar . there is a space and a cleanliness issue and a smell issue and a quality of life issue. how can we save money based on when this needs to be collected and when these trucks can collect so they are not creating traffic? jason: there are a couple of things we need to talk about, street fighting, brawls, peeing in public. dimitra: there is a district with lots of brawls. police are called and often. -- in often. researchers showed the sense of citrus can have a calming effect. carol: aromatherapy. jason: if i smell citrus, i will

not punch you. dimitra: piping the smell into this district has reduced brawls tremendously. it has been a test. this is a city that has done a lot of innovative things. in brighton, in the u.k., a particular tunnel that was prone to vandalism, which included public urination one of the . -- the people in the story said it was essentially a public toilet. music was piped into this tunnel. carol: any music? dimitra: certain types are more effective than others. jason: more ineffective at convincing you not to -- >> relieve yourself in the tu nnel. mexico city, very bad air pollution, they are at the

beginning of an effort. they did something simple. they introduced double-decker buses on one of the most busy avenues because it cuts down on the number of buses and increases the number of people on that one bus and is helping to bring down the co2 emissions. it is like duh, and then like, classical music! carol: moving to a city that talks to itself. jason: dimitra is talking about how 5g can bring people and institutions together seamlessly. dimitra: our big year ahead project is coming in the fall. 5g is coming every year. it is fifth-generation network activity like we have never seen, super fast.

south korea is saying one open air research lab will essentially be the first 5g city. they are in the process of building the network will be fully operational by the end of 2019. that 5g is going to do everything in that city. it will do everything in that city. 5g will enable more communication between electric vehicles. it will help the delivery of various services, like medical services. it will help other things that are not as dire, we need to figure out how to respond to this fire -- this is because the quality of the video will be much crisper. drones will see everything with such detail you will be able to make a much smarter assessment about how to respond. jason: even remote surgery.

dimitra: medical services are going to be transformed. we have learned a little bit about the way artificial intelligence is helping this. it seems wild, you might be able to have a medical professional in a hospital using 5g technology and there will be a setup up somewhere that enables them to operate remotely. carol: for a house visit by a doctor -- or a house visit by a doctor. dimitra: we are at the point of, after seeing many years of this promise, we are finally getting to 5g. jason: coming up, and address system no driver can mess up. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." this is bloomberg. ♪

♪ carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." jason: you can also listen to us on the radio, on sirius xm channel 119, in new york, boston, washington, dc -- >> and in the bay area and in london. jason: one more glimpse for you into the future of cities. carol: they grow and evolve and have systems that don't necessarily work. jason: like addresses. tech companies have been looking for ways to solve this problem. carol co tell us about this company -- character--euro: tell us about this company. way >>e adjusting the it is adjusted around the globe.

they have divided the world into 57 trillion squares, three meters by three meters. each one is about 100 square feet and they have given each a three word name, such as "probing thick spoon." strangely poetic. the way they have done this, they -- if you take the cube root of 57 trillion, it is only about 38,500. it was very easy for them to get -- curse words and homonyms. they still had at least 50,000 words to choose from. they combined these pretty much randomly to give each place on earth and address. -- address.

jason part of the problem to : solve, ambulances, health care -- >> areas around the globe don't have traditional addresses. david: i am on a street in berlin. it is easy to find you in new york city. but if you are living in a rio de janeiro for bella -- favela, or on the outskirts of johannesburg, you have tens of thousands of people living in areas where there really aren't streets or dresses. -- addresses. how do you find those people for emergency services and health care, for delivering stuff to them they might order online? will jason: who is using it and how much is it being taken up?

david: it is just gaining traction. the company is about four or five years old. the company is just picking up speed. they have a deal with the maker of mercedes. they bought 10% of the company earlier this year. you can use it with some but not all of its cars. within a year, it will be within pretty much every mercedes car. the app works pretty well. it had a little bit of trouble understanding my american accent. tomtom is using it. the postal service in eight countries is using it, including mongolia and nigeria, big places. dominos will deliver your pizza

in the caribbean to a 3 word address. carol: other companies are looking at disrupting addresses. tomtom had a system that used alphanumeric codes. google has been doing something. it sounds like this is where we are going in terms of addresses. that section of the world will have that mark, potentially, the three words potentially describing it forever. david: that is what this company wants to happen. it is a reasonable possibility. it is a startup, and they could also kind of disappear. i do feel like this thing has traction. it is not only useful. google has this thing called plus-codes.

it is just as functional, but not as whimsical. this thing, once you hear about it -- but not as whimsical. once you hear about it -- a want of my friends who don't generally brief what i write, this story has taken off among my friends. they are like, what is my address? carol: bloomberg businessweek is available on newsstands. jason: and on our mobile app and online. carol: simplifying addresses. who knew they were such a problem? this new company is using three words to describe every kind of parcel on earth. i want to be like, cool news c hick. jason: i will enter that in and come to your house. dina out in seattle, i know i can talk to her and get the inside scoop. amazon and a couple of billionaires, so much there.

bloomberg television starts right now. ?

>> why do parents come to the united states? >> the people were screaming at us. >> you meet in the harvard medical school paul farmer, who begin talking about the nature of your responsibility to the rest of the world. you lead a protest against the world bank. he said the world bank should be shut down. do you have regrets? >> i am lost we are -- glad we lost that argument.