Texas Donut (Wrap)

 

Time period: Late 20th century to present
Location: Suburban downtowns and car-centered cities across the country

How to provide lots of apartments, while hiding the parking.

Key features
- Mid-rise apartment building wrapped around a multi-story parking garage.
- Requires large piece of land.
- Higher density than garden apartments, less dense than a podium building.

Everything's bigger in Texas - including the apartment buildings. After World War II, advances in air conditioning technology made urban living in hot and humid climates more desirable. Texas was also going through an oil boom. While oil fields tapped out and production peaked in the 1970s, the state's early lead in oil production locked in its position as a headquarters for oil companies, as well as banks and suppliers that supported oil drilling elsewhere in the world.  Since the 2010s, the fracking boom has brought a new wave of oil related jobs to Texas.

While its main Sunbelt rival - California - went down the path of growth controls and downzonings in the 1970s, Texas continued to boom, and in 1994 Texas became the 2nd most populous state in the US, passing New York. Even though New York had begun its recovery, Texas grew even faster.

Typical Texas housing is a suburban house, however, there remained places where higher density was needed, such as downtowns and college towns. However, Texas could not copy New York apartment building designs, since Texas did not have subways. Without high capacity mass transit, residents needed cars, and cars needed parking. Lots of parking.

Zoning, the banks financing the buildings, and the residents moving into them, asked for at least 2 parking spaces for each apartment. Including space for the drive aisle, each parking space requires 300 square feet. That meant half the building would be parking. Neighbors and city planners did not want the experience walking down the street to be block after block of parking garages or lots. To hide the parking, developers put a multi-level garage in the middle of the lot, and wrapped it with apartments.  This has the advantage of putting residents' parking spaces a short walk from their apartment door.


Note the gap between the garage and the apartments. This allows the garage to be naturally ventilated, avoiding the cost of installing fans.

The most efficient layout arranges the garage as a spiral ramp, and takes up a whole block, with the surrounding apartments looking like a giant donut. On smaller or odd-shaped sites, there are also half-donuts (a Texas croissant?), where one side of the garage - usually the one facing a highway or alley - is left open and unwrapped.

While it solves an aesthetic issue, there are still downsides. Because a large site is needed, Texas Donuts are an all-or-nothing development. In existing neighborhoods, large sites are rare, and require land assembly. It can take years for a developer to negotiate with existing owners to buy up dozens of lots, during that time buildings and land sits vacant, creating giant holes in the middle of neighborhoods. Worse, if the project fails to proceed, a block-sized scar is left on the city. The other problem is that while high density, Donuts are still centered around cars, and require wide roads to handle the traffic that comes out of them - a typical Donut with 200 apartments also has 400 cars.

Today, land in Texas downtowns is too valuable for Donuts, and developers have moved on to building highrises. Still, construction of Donuts remains popular in outer neighborhoods and continues across the country. The 4-5 story Donut fills the density niche between 2-3 story garden apartments and 5-8 story podium buildings. Even if the saying "wherever this country is headed, California will get there first" still holds true, for many places, the road there involves a stop in Texas.

Data
- Typical Lot Size: 60,000 square feet or more (1.5+ acres)
- Density: 50-90 units per acre.
- Typical Zoning: Commercial Mixed Use, Multifamily Residential
- Construction Type: Garage is Type I, Reinforced concrete. Apartments are Type III or V wood frame or steel stud.
- Resident Type: Rental or homeownership

Where to build
- Suburbs, along a major road
- Near downtowns of car-dependent major cities
- Car dependent college towns

Further Reading

Comparison of podium (5 over 1) apartments vs. Texas donuts https://www.base-4.com/podiums-vs-wraps-which-to-choose/

Criticism of Texas Donuts compared to less car-centered designs http://www.civicconservation.org/casestudy


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Point Access Block

Image
Time period: Late 19th and early 20th century, revived in 21st century. Location: Used to be everywhere.  Today: Seattle and New York City. A mid-rise building with a couple apartments on each floor.   In most cities, you'll find two types of mid-rise apartment buildings in the 4-7 story range. First, there'll be some small historic buildings downtown, side by side like books on a shelf. These are the original point access blocks. Then, there are the big modern buildings taking up a whole block and with long, windowless hallways inside. These are double loaded corridor buildings. Floorplan of a point access block.   Note that apartments have windows facing the front and back of the building.     In contrast, except for the corner units, apartments in a double loaded corridor only have windows facing one direction. Both the point access block and the double loaded corridor were designed to be the most efficient floorplan given the building codes of th...
Read more

Dingbat

Image
  Time period: 1950s-1960s Location: Los Angeles and other cities in the Western US 6+ homes and parking spaces, all on a standard house-sized lot, named after the fanciful decor tacked onto the front.  The dingbat was invented in post-WWII Los Angeles to meet the housing needs of a growing city as well as growing rates of car ownership. The standard 50' wide, 150' deep LA lot had been gridded out for detached houses, but many were zoned for low-rise apartments. Before the dingbat, the most popular types of medium-density housing were bungalow courts - a series of houses around a central walkway, as well as multistory courtyard apartments. In 1934, both types were banned by a new zoning law that required parking: one space per unit. Developers solved this math problem by turning the front yard into a driveway, leading to a carport that took up the front of the first floor. To maximize space, the second floor extends over the carport, propped up on stilts. This type of structur...
Read more

Fourplex

Image
Time period: 1890s-1920s, 1960s-1980s, 2020s to present day Location: Suburbs nationwide The classic US fourplex is a 2-story building with four apartments: two upstairs, two downstairs. First becoming popular when streetcars (also known as trolleys or trams) made suburbs possible, the fourplex offers choice for households who want to get out of the crowded city but can't afford or don't need a standalone house. Cross section of a fourplex . Before streetcars, city dwellers lived within walking distance of the city center. Few people could afford horses, so walking speed limited the physical size of cities. Adults walk at 2-3 miles per hour, which meant the largest ancient and medieval cities were just a couple miles wide. When population grew, cities would grow upwards, replacing houses with townhouses and tenements, 3-7 stories tall, built right next to each other with walls touching. Streetcars were invented in 1887 and could go much faster. Even with time waiting at traffi...
Read more