The Decline of America’s Public Pools By Eve Andrews

4 comments

1. Eve Andrews: “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.”

   Read more here: [~https://theatln.tc/CN9wMWyv~](https://theatln.tc/CN9wMWyv)

2. This article downplays the continued role of racism a bit (especially by failing to interrogate why people equate “public” and “dirty” despite a long history of humans enjoying public spaces). Here’s a good book on the topic if anyone is interested:

   [The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together](https://www.amazon.com/Sum-Us-Everyone-Prosper-Together/dp/0525509569?dplnkId=20aff5ff-c36f-4bc2-8a6d-a3fd504610e4&nodl=1)

3. We can’t keep our city pools open partially due to lack of workers. It’s hard to find people willing to work a temporary job for such little pay. Our city has basically cherry-picked which pools will open this summer and which don’t.

   Plus with white plight so much of our county income gets invested into suburban parks in neighboring counties. We can’t get bathrooms in our parks but the suburbs have people cleaning their bathrooms 7 days a week.

   Of course we have to invest all this captiol to build 6 lane roads so they can cut their hour long commute into the city down to 45mins.

4. Public pools, city parks, recreation centers, theme parks, and just the act of having children itself. These were all markers of a society where commons was considered a necessity, and wealth was more evenly distributed. I miss that part of the 70s-80s where you didn’t have this heightened tendency of murderous rage between strangers. You could go to public spaces in peace and even strike up a conversation. That kept us all from taking on extreme views about people we don’t know, for a couple of generations at least. We were making progress overcoming a lot of racism and classism for a while.

   Granted, the schools were more overrun by gang violence and so were the streets of poor neighborhoods, but somehow we still had more of an overarching sense of community.