Photo Credit: Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, 1955. Built in 1921, it was the only pool that accommodated the City's black residents. It closed in 1956 following the desegregtion of the city's pools. Afro Newspaper/Getty Images

Understanding Historical and Ongoing Barriers in Aquatic Access  (Structural Racism in the Built Environment) 

Structural racism in the built environment is not an abstract concept—it is visible in every neglected park, shuttered recreation center, and, most strikingly, in the disappearance of public swimming pools across the U.S. Aquatic inequities offer a powerful case study of how policies, planning decisions, and cultural attitudes have shaped who gets to access safety, joy, and community in public space. Equitable access to aquatic environments sits at the intersection of public health, urban planning, planetary health, and racial justice. When entire communities lack safe, supervised, and affordable spaces to learn to swim or recreate in water, the results are evident in today’s persistent racial drowning disparities, inequitable infrastructure investment, and diminished community well-being.

Structural and Historical Barriers

The inequities shaping aquatic access today are rooted in a century-long history of racially exclusionary planning and policy. The precursors to public swimming pools were municipal bathhouses, built across the U.S. beginning in the late 19th century. While these facilities were segregated by gender rather than race, the shift to large-scale public recreation pools in the 1920s and 1930s—many built as Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects—marked the beginning of swimming as a major civic amenity (Wiltse, 2014). Cities across the nation competed to build elaborate resort-style pools, symbols of prosperity and public investment in quality of life. Yet, from their inception, most of these pools excluded Black residents, either through segregation laws or intimidation and violence (McGhee, 2021).

During the Civil Rights era, swimming pools became flashpoints in the fight for integration. Because swimming involves intimate physical proximity, many white communities viewed integration as a violation of social boundaries.  As a result, municipalities across the South and beyond closed or privatize their public pools rather than integrate them, effectively erasing a generation’s access to safe, communal swimming spaces (Wiltse, 2014; McGhee, 2021). In some cases, cities sold or leased public pools to private associations for nominal fees, enabling white-only membership while maintaining the illusion of “local control.” These decisions created lasting “pool deserts”—areas without any public swimming facilities—disproportionately affecting Black and low-income neighborhoods (The Conversation, 2019).

By the 1970s, the vast majority of those WPA-era pools had been drained, filled in, or fallen into disrepair, often replaced by exclusive private clubs or backyard pools that were inaccessible to most residents. The once-democratic vision of public swimming as a symbol of civic equality was replaced by a privatized model of recreation tied to property ownership and income (McGhee, 2021). This historical disinvestment mirrors broader patterns of structural racism in urban design, where public goods were systematically withdrawn from communities of color under the guise of “local choice” or “fiscal responsibility.”

Privatization of Recreation as Modern Structural Racism

Today, the legacy of those decisions persists through the privatization of recreation and youth sports (now a 40B dollar industry per year, as of 2025), which functions as a contemporary form of structural racism in the built environment. 

Families with financial means can afford swim lessons, club memberships, or travel sports, while families in historically excluded neighborhoods continue to face barriers to participation. Public pools remain scarce, lessons are cost-prohibitive, and liability concerns have led many cities to limit access even further. As a result, swimming—a life-saving skill—is now often treated as a private commodity rather than a public right (Irwin et al., 2021).

This privatization compounds racial and economic inequities in health, safety, and community belonging. Lack of early water exposure is directly linked to higher drowning risk, motor development delays, and reduced physical and mental health benefits associated with aquatic play and recreation (Asher et al., 1995; Brenner et al., 2009). These inequities reflect not only the absence of infrastructure but also the presence of systemic exclusion in planning, funding, and zoning decisions that continue to segregate communities by access to life-sustaining public goods.

Understanding structural racism in the built environment requires recognizing that inequities in aquatic access are not accidental or natural—they are the result of deliberate decisions to disinvest in certain communities. Addressing these disparities will require reimagining the built environment as a site of repair, resilience, and restitution, ensuring that every child, regardless of zip code or skin color, can safely access and enjoy the water.

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Structural Racism in the Built Environment & Aquatics Infrastructure

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