Photo Credit: © Marcel Krumphanzl | Dreamstime.com
In the modern age of the haves and have-nots, the Coachella Valley in southern California brings this stark dynamic to life. The Salton Sea, famed for its high salt levels that make it impossible for fish to live in, or people to swim in, is the focal point for the eastern half of the region. To the north are Joshua Tree National Park and Palm Springs. These are areas that draw ample tourism—by some counts, at least three million visitors per year visit the National Park, and around 125,000 attendees visit the namesake music festival—and affluence. It’s not uncommon for coastal families to maintain second homes in the desert resort town, or retire there. But farther south into the Coachella Valley, the eastern swath of the Salton Sea is shockingly rural, and bookended by seemingly endless, bone-dry desert and dust, not dissimilar to the otherworldly appearance of Death Valley National Park a few hours north. If the region sees an inch of rain in any month of the year, it’s extremely lucky. In the summertime, it’s not uncommon for the temperatures to rise upwards of 100 degrees or higher.
Many households in this pocket of the Coachella Valley are descendants of farmworkers in the Bracero program, a mid-century agricultural agreement that permitted Mexican laborers to enter the United States to ease farmworker shortages during World War II. Many descendants still work in agriculture when bell peppers, chiles, grapes, and tomatoes come into season. Those that don’t work in agriculture tend to work in the service industry to keep the tourism infrastructure to the north running.
All of that being said, these communities struggle intensely to access pools or aquatic services to mediate extreme temperatures, dryness, and to recover from physically intensive labor. There are virtually no public pools or aquatic centers along the perimeter of the Salton Sea. By contrast, there are at least five in Palm Springs. Yet, across the board, public pools are disappearing at alarming rates. In 2009, there were an estimated 600,000 municipal pools throughout the country, and about 15 years later, that rate was halved. In 2024, cities in California and Texas tied for the lowest number of public pools per capita in the country. In the American West, pools and aquatic infrastructure also have a major sustainability problem. Seven states are largely dependent on a single source of water: the Colorado River. The river is split into the Upper Basin, which includes Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, and the Lower Basin, which includes Arizona, California, and Nevada. Historically, the Upper Basin has always used less water than what was allocated, while the Lower Basin has always used its share. Early this year the United Nations announced that the world is in the midst of water bankruptcy, which means that humans have “borrowed” so much water that there is no way to get reservoirs back to historic baselines. Using the word bankruptcy in itself is a deliberate choice to steer the public away from thinking of water “shortages” as a passing phenomenon, and to reframe water away from being something that people think can be recuperated when evidence shows that, for millions around the world, there is no going back. All of these elements—extreme heat, diminishing aquatic infrastructure, and limited water resources—are in a moment of flux that makes the case for advocating for aquatic infrastructure in low-income communities increasingly complex, yet paramount. Here’s what to know to make the case to break ground, expand, or keep existing aquatic infrastructure in place.