Come to Buffalo And See First Hand What An Aquatic Desert Looks Like

I read a story this week that made me angry.

Not surprised. Angry.

A six-year-old girl named Ashlyn can swim across the pool and back. Her mother, Ashley, never learned. Ashley grew up in Buffalo with city pools that were only open in the summer. No year-round instruction. No real access. Now she watches her daughter swim and jokes that Ashlyn will have to save her if they’re ever in trouble in the water.

That’s not a heartwarming story. That’s a generational failure dressed up as progress.

Buffalo has one indoor public pool open year-round. One. In a city of nearly 280,000 people on the shores of Lake Erie and the Niagara River. The city has lost half its pools in the last decade. Two are permanently closed. Two more shut for repairs. The outdoor pools that remain will only open this summer if they can find enough lifeguards, which gets harder every year because the pipeline that produces lifeguards starts at the pools they keep closing.

Mike Switalski of the City Swim Project has been teaching kids to swim for free or at subsidized cost since 2012, reaching up to 500 children a year. He said it as plainly as anyone could. Close pools. Fewer swimmers. Fewer people have the skills to become lifeguards. Fewer lifeguards means fewer pools can open. Repeat.

This is what an aquatic desert looks like.

An aquatic desert is not always a place with no pools. Sometimes it is a place with pools that nobody uses. A city that built infrastructure and then walked away from it. A community where the pools exist on paper but the programming — the swim lessons, the lifeguard training, the learn-to-swim access — has been quietly eliminated through years of budget cuts and deferred decisions. Infrastructure without programming is not aquatic access. It is the appearance of access. And communities that mistake one for the other produce the same drowning statistics as communities with no pools at all.

Buffalo is not alone. Pittsburgh has lost roughly half its public pools over the past few decades. Cincinnati dropped from 44 facilities to 24. This pattern is playing out in city after city across the country — and the communities paying the highest price are almost always the ones that were underserved to begin with.

This is where equity in aquatics becomes more than a phrase.

Equity in aquatics is not an abstract value. It is a measurable outcome — who has access to drowning prevention education, who receives swim instruction, who drowns, and who gets left behind. Buffalo has a large Black population. Black children drown in swimming pools at rates 5.5 times higher than white children. Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages one through four in the United States. More than 4,500 Americans drowned each year between 2020 and 2022 — 500 more annually than before the pandemic. These are not unrelated statistics. They are connected directly to decisions communities make about their aquatic facilities.

When a city closes a pool in an underserved neighborhood, it is making an equity decision whether it recognizes it as one or not. When a community fails to fund learn-to-swim programming for children who cannot afford private lessons, it is making an equity decision. When a generation grows up without drowning prevention education because the facilities were never there or were quietly taken away, that is an equity failure with consequences measured in lives.

Ashley Kelley still cannot swim. Her daughter Ashlyn can. That is progress. But it is fragile progress that depends entirely on one pool staying open, one program staying funded, one city finding enough political will to keep the doors unlocked.

This is why I am working with Mark Rauterkus on The Community Aquatics Directive — a framework for civic leaders and aquatic professionals that makes the case for treating pools as public health infrastructure rather than seasonal amenities. Not because the solutions are complicated. They are not. The funding exists. New York State has committed more than $200 million through its NY SWIMS Initiative for exactly this kind of situation. Federal grants, philanthropic funding, and community partnerships are all available to communities willing to make the case.

What is missing is urgency and political will. Decision makers who understand that closing a pool is not a budget decision — it is a public health decision with consequences that play out across generations.

Ashlyn wants to be a lifeguard when she grows up. I hope she gets that chance. I hope the pool is still open when she turns sixteen. I hope the city finds the lifeguards it needs to open the outdoor pools this summer. And I hope the people making those budget decisions read stories like this one and understand what they are actually deciding.

Read the full WKBW report here: https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/buffalo/a-dangerous-cycle-buffalos-shrinking-pool-system-leaves-few-options-for-city-residents

If this resonates with you, I’d love to connect. Find me on LinkedIn where I write about aquatics, community pools, and what it takes to make equity in aquatics a reality — not just a talking point. www.linkedin.com/in/ronusher

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