It was September 2022 and Lexi Pandell, a 33-year-old East Bay native living in nearby Danville, California, was trying to figure out if she should have a bachelorette party. The state was experiencing a heat wave—“the hottest and longest on record” for the month of September, the governor noted. All across the West, more than a thousand heat records were broken. There was only one idea that made any kind of sense: a pool.

“I am in a part of town that’s a lot of ranch-style homes and rentals,” Pandell says. There is no pool at her place or at any of her friends’; none of them live on “the other side of town [where] it’s these mega-mansions with giant pools and giant backyards.” As the world gets hotter, we are becoming a country increasingly obsessed with private pools—there are more than 10 million in the U.S.—but only eight percent of American households have a residential pool, according to research by the Pool and Hot Tub Alliance.

Pandell wasn’t concerned about having a bachelorette party at all, but her friends offered to plan it. She insisted on something low-key: a private, intimate setting where a group of millennial women could drink, get Mexican food delivered, and listen to Beyoncé in peace. Basically, she wanted to simulate the experience of owning a pool without actually owning a pool.

Thankfully, there’s an app for that: Swimply, a marketplace that allows users to rent pools owned by their more fortunate neighbors. The service, which takes a 15 percent cut from hosts (who set their hourly rate) and 10 percent from guests, now lists about 25,000 pools in 125 markets in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

Pandell’s friends had heard good things about what’s commonly referred to as the “Airbnb for pools.” Given the small size of their town, when they opened the app they didn’t have to search long. For just $80 an hour, they’d get to float in a saltwater oasis, plus so much more: There were rocks to jump off, plus a slide, a waterfall, a hot tub, and more lounge furniture than they could possibly use. The outdoor area also included a massive kitchen with a bar and a grill, speakers, and a TV, as well as private bath/shower access and free Wi-Fi. The reviews were all glowing.

“I am extremely jealous of all the people here who do have pools. So I was like, Well, I can kind of live the fantasy for a second,” Pandell says. “There is something really intriguing about getting a dip into the other side and, on the other hand, kind of depressing too. I live only a few miles from you, but what a different existence I have.”

In the West, we dream of water. California is home to some 1.3 million private pools. The indoor/outdoor lifestyle dream traces back a century, to when the rich and famous zeroed in on the pool as one of the most aspirational features of a California home.

Starting in the late 1920s, architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra began designing homes for their Californian clients with pools as integral architectural features, not just rectangles out back filled with water. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were said to have built the first in-ground pool in the L.A. area at their Beverly Hills estate; the couple were famously photographed canoeing in the pool, which was 100 feet long. It wasn’t until the middle of the century, when a California-based company refined gunite, essentially sprayable concrete, that private pools became much more affordable.

But long before the private pool became the object of lust of every upwardly mobile American household, public pools were symbols of our country’s commitment to exclusion. In the early 1900s, pools were segregated by gender, but their eventual integration meant the intimate public spaces became hotbeds of fear over miscegenation. In the 1920s and ’30s, though thousands of public swimming pools were opened across the country—what is known as the “swimming pool age”—virtually all were segregated racially, either by law or by acts of violence.

According to Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, some historians say the modern civil rights movement kicked off in Southern California over the right to swim at public pools. In 1914, Pasadena opened the Brookside Plunge for whites only. Protests from Black citizens brought a concession: People of color could come one day a week, right before the pool was cleaned. Further protests led to a complete ban until 1929, when the once-weekly day—dubbed “International Day”—was reinstated. The pool wouldn’t desegregate until 1947—only to shut down a year later. It was the racial integration of pools across the country that led to mass shutdowns, and the wealthy flocked to new private (and segregated) swim clubs or took aim at getting ones of their own.

The desire for a pool of one’s own would be emphasized for Californians, who, even before we recognized that the effects of climate change exacerbated matters, were plagued by drought and punishing heatwaves. To us, the pool is a kind of oasis, our collective thirst intensified by a cultural obsession with glamour and leisure. “A pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable,” wrote Joan Didion in 1979, two years after the state experienced its driest year in history up to that point. “Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”

The punishing drought of the mid-1970s was one of many times that nature has intervened to pull back the veneer of the Californian dream. We owe the popularity of the phrase “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down” to this period. Exuberant green lawns across the state were drained of all life (and color) as families were instructed to turn off their sprinklers. In some places, couples would shower in pairs and collect water in a bucket to use later for flushing toilets or laundry. And, of course, people drained their pools. Environmentalism, coupled with a wave of foreclosures, meant pool draining hit hard in Southern California, where the majority of the state’s gorgeous money pits are located. Perfectly paved kidney beans filled with aquamarine H₂O became unattended wastelands that (to some) were ripe with opportunity.

The western impulse is to create something out of nothing, and it can’t be dissuaded by concepts like private property. Pioneering skateboarders like Tony Alva, Steve Olson, and Stacy Peralta realized that these empty pools would be perfect for their burgeoning sport. They’d search fancy neighborhoods for the nicest ones and then, when people were at work, hop their fences and do half pipes all day.

“L.A. was the backyard pool mecca. But not just the backyard pool mecca, the properly, beautifully designed backyard pool. I don’t know of any place in the world that has that proliferation of that kind of voluptuous, sensuous design,” Peralta said on the podcast 99 Percent Invisible in 2017. “We fell in love with the shapes.”

Though many days would end with angry homeowners chasing the boys off, for those brief moments the skaters got access to a world previously off-limits. The lack of water was essential, and when the skaters encountered pools that were still wet, they drained them. “We were a bunch of scruffy kids and here we are riding in backyard pools and we know what we’re doing is beautiful,” Peralta said. “And we get to feel beautiful.”

It was 2016, and Bunim Laskin was stuck inside his family home in Lakewood, New Jersey, recovering from surgery, when it came to him. Through one of the windows, he noticed his neighbor’s pool was sitting unused; she had built it for her grandchildren, but they rarely visited. As the eldest of 12 children, Laskin was always on the lookout for ways to entertain his siblings, and traveling anywhere was a logistical nightmare. He wondered if his neighbor would let them swim in exchange for a fee.

It wasn’t long until Laskin recruited five other families in the neighborhood, and the payments started covering 25 percent of his neighbor’s maintenance costs. Two years later, Laskin—along with cofounder Asher Weinberger—launched Swimply with four pools. They started using Google Earth to find more, and a combination of knocking on doors and word of mouth helped them acquire 100 pools and 400 reservations; in 2019, they were able to raise about $1 million from family and friends. The coronavirus ended up being a gift for the platform, as people were desperate for safe outdoor spaces where they could hang with friends. In the first year of the pandemic, the two partners say, they saw a 4,000 percent increase in revenue, which allowed them to raise $50 million from venture capitalists, including Airbnb and Lime cofounders, the following year. Restricted travel and quarantine requirements added appeal to the Swimply tagline “Escape locally.”

The “escape” isn’t solely about the pool itself. Laskin claims a “whole bunch of users” don’t even get in the water—they just enjoy the freedom and relaxation of hanging out by it. Laskin thinks this is because pools are “places where [you] can be alive and not just exist.” The calming effects of the pool work whether you get in or not—as a kind of peace by proxy. (It’s possible that Instagramming from a fancy location helps too.)

According to Laskin, one of the main appeals to users and hosts is connection. Harking back to the early days of Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, Swimply is marketed as a pathway to human connection. It’s not just for renting a pool; it’s for becoming friends with neighbors. “It doesn’t even feel transactional; it feels neighborly,” Laskin tells me on Zoom, from Swimply’s Los Angeles office, admitting that “at first glance, the idea of privacy sounds almost like segmenting.” (Of course, that hosts can discriminate however they want when approving neighbor guests is a much discussed issue across every platform in the sharing economy space.)

Laskin describes Swimply as a creator of community, which is, ironically, a main argument for why public pools should exist. But he says there’s safety in privacy: You don’t have to be in a bathing suit around strangers, you can more carefully supervise a group, and the water quality is superior. Admittedly, there’s a limit to “safety” when you consider that Swimply pools, being private, aren’t required to have lifeguards. In June 2022, a seven-year-old girl drowned at a Swimply “superhost” rental, which, Laskin told CNN, was a “pool incident” rather than a Swimply incident. The company offers up to $1 million in insurance coverage to its hosts, and water safety guidelines for users offer suggestions to help ensure the safety of all the guests. When fighting back against health officials in Minnesota who demanded that Swimply hosts meet a variety of public pool codes, cofounder Weinberger told the Star Tribune he “doesn’t consider backyard pools rented through his app public, ‘no more than Airbnb homes are hotels or Airbnb pools are public pools.’”

Outside of practical reasoning, people have a contemporary desire to experience spontaneous human connection but only in highly controlled environments. They want connection, but it needs to be curated and intimate—and it needs to be aspirational. They want to feel rich, and that’s something a public space will never get you.

For her bachelorette party, Lexi Pandell was hosted by a 40-ish couple with a young daughter. Her friends arrived at the picture-perfect suburban home early to set up and were greeted by the nice and normal husband. Before venturing back into the house, he asked the women if there was anything else they needed. One responded with a joke: “Not unless you have a sexy cop outfit,” a cheeky nod to traditional bachelorette parties. Everyone laughed and got back to setting up, and the host disappeared inside.

“I’m a woman who can casually jump into the spa after a half-hearted attempt at bathing suit Pilates.”

Pandell arrived soon after through a side gate. “We all were kind of commenting, like, I can’t believe that this is real. It seems so impossible that this website exists—you can rent somebody’s pool and be in their backyard.” Three hours passed as the friends lived out the dream of listening to Renaissance while enjoying Aperol spritzes. Pandell was the first one to try the water slide, and she was in heaven, posting snapshots from the party on her Instagram Stories.

As they were enjoying slices of princess cake, Pandell noticed a man in a cop outfit approaching the pool. She assumed he was a real officer there to get them in trouble because of the noise, but his short-shorts were odd. It took the group a second to realize it was their Swimply host in a Reno 911! Lieutenant Dangle costume. They broke out in laughter and noticed that, inside, his small child was looking on, clad in her swimsuit and a towel, waiting for them to leave so she could use the pool.

Pandell’s party was a success. Even better, it gave her a funny story for life. Hosts all take their own approach to interacting with their guests, and some are more hands-on than others. Jim Battan is a 58-year-old IT consultant who has been “trying to get retired” for some time now, and the side hustle that’s made him $200,000 in two and a half years isn’t helping. Battan, who lives just outside West Linn, Oregon, started hosting on Swimply in September 2020 to offset the $100,000 cost of installing his immaculate luxury pool. His daughters had gone off to college, and it bothered him that his creation often sat empty.

“During the pandemic, it was the only way for the kids to get out of the house. The community center pools were closed, and there was no gymnasium and all that kind of stuff,” says Battan, who has had the number one Swimply pool in the country. “One mom would come and experience and then go to tell the whole PTA about it. Now, pretty much the whole of one elementary school has been here.”

It isn’t always easy being a normal guy who suddenly has a high-traffic pool full of strangers in his backyard. But the worst “accident” that’s ever happened to him has been a guest running over some plants. “It’s always advertised as, Oh, you don’t even have to be there. All this passive income with virtually no effort. And I always laugh at them and say, ‘That’s ridiculous,’” says Battan. Since he plans to actually retire soon, he and his wife are considering moving, and as such, they are trying to wind down their Swimply business and focus on packing up the house. But he’s hoping his decision won’t mean his area is going to lose its favorite pool.

“That’s gonna be one of the big, key selling points of the house,” Battan says. “You now have the top Swimply pool in the country, if you wanna keep it up.”

The day I’m set to try Swimply for myself, nature has other plans: rain. California has always had variable weather, but climate change has made the extremes increasingly dangerous and intolerable. Multiple Swimply hosts in my neighborhood of Los Feliz cancel on me, as Angelenos often take the day off when it drizzles. A couple days later, Swimply arranges for me to visit a pool that’s been featured in one of the company’s ads for $72 an hour in Tarzana. It looks like the Platonic ideal of a new-construction, suburban pool, encircled by shrubbery, gray lounge chairs, and a white pool house. I drive one hour (with traffic, naturally) to the Valley, where private pools are abundant and the weather is slightly warmer.

Before I arrive, the host sends me a message with instructions. The gate is open, and I can park in the driveway if I want. When I pull in to park next to a Porsche and a Mercedes, the host comes out to say hi and shows me around back to the massive pool and hot tub, which is already bubbling. The bathroom is around the side of the guesthouse; floaties are on the lawn; and if I hear chickens, don’t be alarmed—there’s a coop tucked away somewhere. The interaction lasts a total of one minute before the host disappears inside, giving me the run of the place.

Her minimal contact with me is ideal; it makes it easy to forget I don’t own the pool. I proceed to do what I imagine I’d do all the time if this life were mine: grab the yoga mat and light weights I brought and start working out in the sun. Occasionally, I feel self-conscious, but by the time I head over to the hot tub for a soak-and-attempt-to-meditate, I’ve completely forgotten that someone could be in the house, watching me. This is my life now; I’m a woman who can casually jump into the spa after a half-hearted attempt at bathing suit Pilates.

But it’s not long until the reverie is broken. Fifteen minutes before my reservation is up, I’m cordially alerted that it’s time to collect my things and get out. I am reminded of something Pandell told me of her experience. “As a kid, I really idolized these people. I would go to their houses and it was a completely different world, and I really wanted it for myself,” Pandell said. “Now I’m an adult, and I still don’t have it, and sixteen-year-old me would be very disappointed about that. I can rent it, but there will always be someone there to remind me that it is still not mine.”

Top photo by Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images; composer, producer, and musician Giorgio Moroder is seen at his pool in 1979 with a group of backup singers.

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