Why investment in public pools took a dive
The end of summer isn’t far away, but the sweltering persists in parts of the country. For many Americans, a sure way to beat the heat is to go for a swim. If you live far from a public beach, though, your ability to chill out in the water may be limited by your access to a pool.
The Association of Pool and Spa Professionals estimates that of the about 10.7 million swimming pools in the U.S., only 309,000 are open to the public. That number has been largely static in the last few decades, freelance journalist Eve Andrews reported for The Atlantic.
Public pools can serve as important community spaces, but besides their social benefit, pools offer relief from extreme, sometimes life-threatening, heat. So, if public pools are a valuable resource, why are they overlooked?
Andrews joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to discuss her article on the decline of the American public pool. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: When did the decline in public pools start in this country?
Eve Andrews: It started around the 1950s and ’60s, when desegregation was just getting started, and cities and suburbs and towns had to make all their public spaces equally available to people of all races. A lot of white residents who did not feel enthusiastically about this development really protested and made a movement to close public pools rather than have to share them in a racially integrated way.
Ryssdal: And then the public pools that were left through the ’70s and ’80s, what happened to them?
Andrews: The ’70s and ’80s represented a major period of financial difficulty for cities, and public pools aren’t necessarily considered the most crucial infrastructure when compared to roads and buses and everything else, and so they ended up on the chopping block of city budgets and went out the window.
Ryssdal: And now we find ourselves having just come through a global pandemic when nobody really wanted to be really close to anybody else, and public pools kind of suffered, right?
Andrews: Definitely. In that summer of 2020, a lot of cities’ public pools closed, you know, because of concern about disease spread. And interestingly enough, in that year, construction of private pools, like at people’s homes, in their residences, increased by, I think, about 30% from the year before. After that first summer, it was kind of hard for cities to get people to come back to the pools to rebuild that habit that had been lost.
Ryssdal: We should point out here, though, that that cities are sort of seeing the light again, right? You mentioned New York City and Eric Adams, the mayor there, spending a billion dollars on public pools to improve and build new ones.
Andrews: Yeah. So, the angle that I was exploring in this piece focused on the possibility of funding public pools as climate infrastructure, you know, because they offer this really important reprieve from extreme heat that, as anyone who’s lived through the past summer can tell you, is getting to be a real problem in cities.
Ryssdal: It has been, I am sad to say, many years since I’ve been in a public pool. You?
Andrews: Oh my God, I go as much as I can.
Ryssdal: So, you have one nearby?
Andrews: Yes, I have several nearby, because Pittsburgh, where I live, actually has the second-highest number of public pools per capita, which is something I learned when I was researching this piece. And there is a really, really strong culture of going to the public pool here. And it’s a really, I’m sorry to use a cliche term, but vibrant scene.
Ryssdal: That’s really interesting because I’m speaking here in Southern California, where the public pool vibe is not very strong, but there are a lot of private pools in backyards, you know?
Andrews: Yes, I actually had a friend comment to me after this piece came out. He’s from Pittsburgh and he lives in the [San Francisco] Bay Area now, and he said, “This piece really made me wonder why there isn’t such a public pool culture in California.”
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