Pool Rentals Inherit Segregation's Private Logic

A company called Swimply has logged 275,000 private pool reservations this year, with homeowners renting their pools to strangers by the hour.

It's being covered as a sharing economy success story. A sensible answer to summer heat and the scarcity of public swimming access. The reporting treats it as neutral market innovation, supply meeting demand, technology solving a problem.

But the argument rests on an assumption that nobody examines. That solution to unequal access is to circulate private wealth, not expand public provision. It takes for granted that a backyard pool is a natural asset to be mobilized when public swimming disappears.

It isn't obvious. It's actually a choice—one with a specific history. After the desegregation of public pools in the 1950s and 60s, white suburbs simply closed theirs rather than integrate. Municipalities drained them. The private backyard pool became the American answer to shared public space, and Swimply inherits that logic. When collective goods fail, privatize instead of rebuilding the commons.

This isn't just nostalgia. The framing matters because it determines what solutions get tried. If you believe the problem is that public pools closed, you push to reopen them. If you believe the problem is that someone with a pool and someone without a pool can't connect, you build Swimply. Both groups might feel they're solving the same problem.

The question for the reader isn't whether this is good or bad. It's what you're agreeing to when you accept that this is how problems get solved. When the default move is to make private goods circulate rather than restore public ones, what does that do to the possibility of genuinely shared space? And what kinds of problems become invisible because you've already decided the answer doesn't require redistribution?