When Public Pools Close, Who Loses Out?

In July 1963, Betty Leinweber and her siblings were overjoyed: a swimming pool was about to open to the public right across the street from their home in Inglewood, Calgary’s oldest neighbourhood.

“The first summer they had it organized so that you could swim in the evening,” she said. “So my dad would take my sister, my brother and myself, and we would go and swim under the stars almost every evening.”

While the Inglewood Pool is no longer an outdoor pool (it was encased in 1966), Leinweber still lives across the street from the facility, and continues to swim there six days a week, one-and- a-half miles a day. She’s been doing this for 40 years.

“I like to walk, but because of issues with my hips I can’t walk like I used to, so I find that swimming satisfies that craving for exercise,” she said. “It just makes you feel really good all over; swimming provides you with that sort of meditation space, there’s nothing in your mind except one stroke after the other.”

And regular swimming has become more than an opportunity for Leinweber to stay active. “The social part is very important,” she told The Tyee. “If you see a crew of people often, eventually you will say hello and strike up a conversation, and then you get to know them a little bit more and look for them when they’re not there. We keep an eye on each other.”

On Sept. 21, Leinweber and other regular users of the Inglewood Pool participated in a rally to protest the facility’s closure, scheduled for Dec. 22 — but their effort didn’t change city hall’s resolution.

The Inglewood Aquatic Centre is the latest in a string of swimming pool closures in Calgary’s inner city, which began in 2021 with the Gray Family YMCA in Eau Claire, followed by the Beltline Aquatic and Fitness Centre in 2022. Earlier this month, a non-profit organization, Vecova, also announced the forthcoming 2025 closure of its swimming pool in Calgary’s northwest.

In all cases, rising maintenance costs for aging facilities and low attendance have been cited as reasons to shut down the facilities — a growing trend across North America.

To tackle the rising cost of upgrading, maintaining and operating public pools in the face of budget cuts, the City of Calgary is opting to consolidate recreation services in large, partner-run facilities across the city at the expense of smaller, single-use facilities like the Inglewood Pool.

“Anyone who’s a progressive and who has an education in city building will be skeptical right off the bat about any argument for centralization,” said Gian-Carlo Carra, a Calgary city councillor whose ward includes Inglewood.

“The counterpoint, or the reason I’ve come to accept this when it comes to flat-water pools, is that pools cost a tremendous amount of money, you’re always going to be subsidizing it, and when you have a facility that brings in other kinds of users for yoga and weightlifting and basketball and other things, you get a healthier cross-subsidization.”

City administrators estimate that closing the Inglewood Pool in December will save taxpayers $1.4 million in short-term repairs and operational costs, an amount that will be offset by $2 million in demolition costs.

A ‘complete community’?

The impact of shutting down aging facilities in the inner city can create challenges for the success of other city policies, including Calgary’s municipal development plan. This high-level planning document strives to create “complete communities,” or neighbourhoods where Calgarians can meet all of their daily needs within walking distance, mitigating the growth of the prairie city’s environmental footprint.

“I think this is a complete contradiction to the notion of complete communities,” said Byron Miller, professor of geography and urban studies at the University of Calgary, about the pool closures in the inner city.

“You’re basically replacing facilities that you can walk or bike to with facilities you have to drive to. And there’s also broader questions of access: people are pressed for time, and if you have to go a greater distance, that’s going to take more time.”

A 2010 report found that Calgarians are willing to travel for up to 20 minutes to access a recreation facility, regardless of the transportation mode.

For Inglewood residents, reaching the nearest swimming pool, the MNP Community & Sport Centre, takes more than half an hour on foot, at least 30 minutes on transit, or eight minutes by car.

Julie Alati-it has lived in Inglewood since 2009 and regularly walks with her two sons to the Inglewood Aquatic Centre. Easy access to the neighbourhood pool has allowed the young family to meet more people beyond their next-door neighbours.

“Our values are around building community,” Alati-it said. “And it’s important to us that our children know how to engage with other people.”

When the Inglewood Pool closes in December, Alati-it’s loss will be palpable.

“It’s very difficult for us to drive, bike or take transit to other recreation centres,” she said, pointing at the challenge posed by needing to spend more time and money to get to MNP Centre.

“We’ll probably go swimming less, and we won’t see the families and seniors we see there anymore.”

Increasingly exclusive venues for swimming

Although access to abundant services and amenities within walking distance of one’s home is often touted as a fair trade-off to paying a premium to live in a central neighbourhood, ensuring an adequate provision of recreation facilities for all ages and abilities remains beyond the scope of Calgary’s city planning policies.

“I don’t think there’s an explicit connection between Local Area Planning and the stated goals of the MDP,” Miller said about the two documents guiding city planning decisions. “There’s very little attention to public recreation facilities, outside of parks.”

As a result of this disconnect, walking to a swimming pool in Calgary’s central neighbourhoods is slowly becoming a luxury.

Three years after YMCA Calgary sold their Eau Claire building to Telsec, a real estate developer, the facility is expected to reopen in 2025 as an exclusive athletic club, where the initiation fee for a family membership costs $19,500.

In the Beltline, the loss of the neighbourhood’s public pool is overshadowed by the rise of private recreation amenities, including swimming pools in new apartment buildings, a trend noted in a 2020 report produced by the City of Calgary.

Meanwhile, to address the recreation needs of the roughly 60,000 Calgarians who’ve been affected by pool closures since 2021, city council allocated $57.5 million to expand MNP Centre, the sole public recreation facility remaining in the city’s centre. The expansion plan includes pledges to build specialized amenities like leisure pools, water slides and a lazy river.

“The MNP Centre is already a world-class facility,” Coun. Carra said. “It’s drawing a big number of people. It has the ability to be many things to many people, which is what you’re looking for.”

In 2019, MNP Centre recorded over 660,000 swims, a situation facilitated by the fact that Calgarians tend to travel longer distances to a specialized leisure centre.

But this doesn’t mean MNP Centre meets everyone’s needs.

Higher access fees and longer travel times could keep less-affluent Calgarians — short in both time and money — from reaping the many benefits of low-impact, water-based activities.

“The drop-in fee for MNP is a lot of money,” said Alati-it. “I know they have a very fancy facility, but while my children have tried the swim lessons and summer camps there, they’re really out of our price range.”

Even with a low-income discount, drop-in fees at MNP Centre are $9 for adults and between $3.50 and $5.25 for children and youth, a significant amount relative to other city facilities.

At the Inglewood Pool, Fair Entry fees range between $2 for adults and less than $1 for children under 12.

A real community amenity

Unlike suburban neighbourhoods, Inglewood remains relatively underserved when it comes to indoor recreation facilities. Although the YWCA opened a fitness facility in the community five years ago, going to the gym isn’t a suitable choice for people whose health needs demand low-impact exercise.

Walking to the Inglewood Pool three times a week has been essential for Heather Campbell’s recovery after undergoing cancer treatment seven years ago. “Participating in aquatic fitness and swimming after I had breast surgery was a major contributing factor to me having significant improvements in the range of motion,” she said.

But as the hours and programs at the Inglewood Pool have become more limited, Campbell often drives to another public facility in Renfrew, an inner-city neighbourhood in Calgary’s northeast, a situation she finds far from ideal.

“It’s an absolute pain,” she said, pointing at the lack of a direct transit connection between Inglewood and Renfrew.

For Campbell, the closure of the Inglewood Pool means more than the loss of a convenient amenity in her neighbourhood — it’s also an affront to the legacy of a working-class community.

Sitting on a parcel of land donated to the city by the Calgary Brewing and Malting Company, former owner of the adjacent brewery, the Inglewood Pool came to exist thanks to the advocacy of community members who spent years raising funds to meet the requirements of a dollar-for-dollar grant program for public pools that city hall then had in place.

“The Inglewood Pool is a gift from the community, by the community, for the community into the future,” Campbell said. “Who takes away a gift?”

The end of an era

In the face of budgetary constraints, choosing to keep one pool open means losing another, as all of the 13 public pools in the City of Calgary owns and operates were built more than three decades ago — and the average lifespan of an indoor pool in Canada is 32 years.

“Some of these aging facilities can no longer be operated successfully,” said Heather Johnson, director of recreation and social programs at the City of Calgary, during a presentation to council on Oct. 8.

Being the smallest, least-used public pool in the entire city, the Inglewood Aquatic Centre is “not an efficient facility,” Johnson noted before council, adding that better used pools should take funding priority, even if they too require costly upgrades.

After Johnson’s presentation, council proceeded to vote to ratify administration’s decision to close the Inglewood Aquatic Centre on Dec. 22.

“I’m not trying to be a capitalistic shill here, but I am looking at this from the fact that we have a scarcity of recreation amenities,” Coun. Carra told The Tyee a few minutes before voting in favour of the pool’s closure. “We have to make a lot more of them, and we have to be very thoughtful about how we deliver them. Inglewood will lose a pool, but there will be a bunch of other recreational amenities that Inglewood gets.”

Next year, city administrators are expected to present GamePlan, a strategy that will not only define the city’s long-term recreation vision and identify current and future recreational needs, but determine the fate of the city’s remaining public pools.

“Let’s invest in the future with GamePlan,” Carra said during debate in council.

“To the people in Inglewood who love this pool, and I’m one of them — I’m sorry.”