The Decline of America’s Public Pools

It was the perfect climate conundrum: In August 2022, a mudslide poured into the Highland Park Pool in Pittsburgh. A bout of torrential rain—of the kind that has been accompanying more and more rainstorms in Appalachia—triggered the event, and the pool had to close for the rest of the season to attend to the extensive cleanup and repair. In other words, a natural disaster that’s becoming more and more frequent badly damaged a refuge that many people rely on to stay cool and comfortable in the rising summer heat.

When temperatures soar into the 90s, and humidity turns clothing into the tormentor of skin, there is a blissful escape for many inland city dwellers: the public pool. Pittsburgh is fortunate, in that the city council and mayor’s office have prioritized the care and upkeep of its aging city-pool system, and the city has the second-highest number of operational swimming pools per capita in the country. But that infrastructure is straining from age—most American municipal pools are several decades old—and funding for public parks and recreation is not exactly limitless.

The state of American public pools is a classic example of “deferred maintenance,” in climate-infrastructure parlance. Many pools have gone neglected or underfunded for years—even in cities like Pittsburgh, where there’s ample political will to keep pools open, keeping up with repairs takes a lot of resources. (A report from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources noted that thousands of community parks across the state “face staffing and funding constraints as municipalities prioritize what are viewed as essential services for their residents,” which could include road and utility maintenance.) Data analysis by the Trust for Public Lands shows that the number of publicly managed pools that are open in the 100 most populous cities in America has remained largely unchanged during the past decade, with one pool for every 47,761 residents. That stagnation reflects a troubling trend of falling investment in public infrastructure in America since 1970. Meanwhile, many city populations have grown, and summers have gotten hotter.

One could attribute the national decline of public pools, at least in part, to an arguably American aversion to sharing space, which was certainly not improved by a global pandemic that mandated isolation and avoidance of crowds. (Notably, the Pool & Hot Tub Alliance reported a huge jump in home swimming-pool construction in 2020.) For some, “public” also carries a connotation of “dirty”—and especially in the case of municipal pools, that connotation has deep ties to racist reactions to desegregation.

The University of Montana historian Jeff Wiltse has traced the rise and fall of municipal pools in the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s, the federal government funded a “tidal wave” of construction, and thousands of public pools were built across the country. During the era of desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than comply with new requirements for equal access to public facilities, many cities and towns closed their swimming pools—in large part due to outcry from white residents. (Pittsburgh’s Highland Park Pool, which was integrated by court order in the early 1950s, was infamously the site of significant abuse to Black patrons.)

Wiltse writes that during that period, “private swim clubs sprouted in the nation’s suburbs like crabgrass during a wet spring,” from roughly 1,200 in 1952 to more than 23,000 just 12 years later. And as budget deficits increased and the threat of bankruptcy loomed in cities, more and more urban pools closed during the 1970s and 80s.

So how do we come back from years and years of neglecting a crucial public asset? Lately, extreme heat has been—unsurprisingly—coming up more and more in city discussions as a justification for maintaining and adding more municipal pools. As heat waves become more brutal and frequent, perhaps our public pools should no longer be viewed as sites for recreation—they should be categorized as crucial climate infrastructure, and funded accordingly.

In 2022, the residents of Florissant, Missouri—a middle-class suburb of St. Louis—voted to institute the first city-specific property tax in its history for a bond that exclusively funds the pools. This summer, Florissant was able to update and reopen its largest public pool: the Koch Park Aquatic Center, which had been decommissioned since 2017 due to structural failure. Florissant Mayor Timothy Lowery told me that when the city council was considering reopening the pool, they talked about the oppressive temperatures of Missouri summers, which “seem to get hotter and hotter.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration went a step further in June and cited climate change as a direct reason for a capital investment of more than $1 billion to improve and build public pools in the city. But some urban climate wonks are focused less on public pools and more on a buzzy concept called the “swimmable city,” a proposal that would allow heat-afflicted residents to plunge carefree into the rivers and natural waterways that run through their neighborhoods. Vivek Shandas, the founder of the Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab at Portland State University, points out that the waterways have to be clean for the idea to work, which is a pretty costly and complex way of improving water access in cities: “Why don’t we take care of what we have before we go in and invest billions of dollars in cleaning a river?”

Money from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal has already boosted capital investment in public parks, according to Will Klein, the associate director for parks research at the Trust for Public Lands. Grants from programs like BRIC are meant to increase “community resilience” to natural disasters like extreme heat, the Inflation Reduction Act provided more than $1 billion in funding for urban-tree cover and similar initiatives, and the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center provides support for cooling centers that “leverage existing infrastructure.” If more public pools could qualify for similar opportunities on the basis of their role in relieving communities from heat, cities could be less reliant on voter-approved levies like Florissant’s for funding.

Investing in swimming pools is “one of those very tangible, real, and just-under-our-nose [solutions] that seem all too obvious,” says Shandas. Americans would miss a significant opportunity to deal with extreme heat if we fail to recognize and protect the enormous value of our existing public infrastructure. Much of the climate and conservation movement recognizes the importance of natural and wild spaces for our health and resilience against climate change. Our urban spaces deserve that same respect.