Neighborhood pools are running into trouble, both because the aging infrastructure requires more spending to keep it intact, and because, well, nobody wants to swim any more.
Surveys by the National Sporting Goods Association show a steady decline since the 1980s in the number of Americans participating in recreational swimming: 47 million people ages 7 and older said they went swimming more than once in 2003, compared with 71 million in 1988.
Potential home buyers are also less interested in having an outdoor swimming pool in their developments, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
“In a two-income family, after working a full day, who feels like coming home and packing up the kids to go to the pool when you can come home and sit in your air conditioning?” said Sue Jacoby, board president at Wodenschiere, which had about 500 members and a waiting list when it opened in the 1960s but has dropped to around 200 in the past few years.
Interesting. I can certainly understand the “busy-busy” argument (though not because I prefer to just lounge about in air conditioning), but our neighborhood pool remains pretty packed — and membership fees (it’s private, not public) are pretty steep, which may mean that the people who belong are there because they want to be.
I dunno. I didn’t grow up in a neighborhood with such a pool (pools in SoCal tend to be privately owned in peoples’ back yards, so if you know someone, you get to swim), so I can’t gauge the change over the decades. But it would be a shame to see them go the way of the Dodo.