The surefire way to make America's apartments bigger, brighter, and cheaper

iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI

"Are you familiar with the Texas doughnut?" Chris Gannon, an Austin architect, asked me recently. The question wasn't about confections. He was riffing on apartment construction, explaining why America can't seem to get behind the kinds of buildings that he and other pro-housing advocates want to see.

The "Texas doughnut" is shorthand for a large apartment building, often spanning an entire city block, where a ring of street-facing units conceals a parking garage in the middle.