Dear developers
This is the thing I would bet the farm on. I am not asking you to believe me — I am asking you to run it against your own numbers, which I do not have and will not pretend to.
The asymmetry
Pour it while the hole is open
Everything else on this page is an argument. This part is just sequencing.
A pool that goes in during construction shares the excavation, the crew, the permits, the mechanical room and the roof that were being built anyway. The same pool added afterward is a demolition project wearing a fundraising campaign, and it will be somebody’s decade.
Retrofit is a capital campaign. Inclusion is a line item.
You already know this better than I do. It is the same reason the conduit goes in before the drywall. The window is open exactly once per building, and it closes quietly.
The climate argument
Three months against twelve
An outdoor pool in Michigan is an amenity you can photograph. It serves a summer, and the marketing photograph is taken in July for a reason.
Cover it and heat it and the same capital serves the whole year — and it serves hardest in the months when your residents are most likely to be indoors, restless, and quietly deciding whether they like living there. Cold states are not a problem for this amenity. They are the entire market for it.
The one people actually use
You have built the gym that sits empty by February. You have built the lounge that became a place for packages. The amenity arms race keeps producing rooms that photograph well and get used twice.
A warm pool is different, and the reason is boring and reliable: it is one of the very few forms of exercise available to a body that hurts. Bad knees, bad back, post-surgery, pregnant, arthritic, heavy, eighty. Warm water carries the weight that the joint can’t. There is no treadmill equivalent of that.
People do not organise their week around a gym. They organise it around a pool.
Which is a retention argument, and retention is the only amenity math that has ever mattered. A resident who swims four mornings a week is not comparison-shopping in the spring.
The one nobody pitches you
It is what you hand the planning commission
You need approvals. You need variances, density, parking relief, a council that is not hostile on the third reading. And you are usually arriving with an offer of traffic and shadow.
A walkable indoor pool, open to the block, is a concession that is legible to every person in that room. It is not a park bench with your name on it. It is a public health asset a city cannot otherwise afford, arriving on private capital, and it converts your project from something a neighbourhood tolerates into something it wants finished on schedule.
Make it walkable and you have also answered the objection underneath the objection. A backstop you need a car to reach is a fee with extra steps; a pool the block can walk to is the difference between an amenity and an argument you have already won.
The ask
Pour it during construction. Not phase two. There is no phase two.
Put a roof on it. Three months is a photograph; twelve is a reason to renew.
Keep it warm. A lap pool at competition temperature excludes the exact people it could serve best.
Make it walkable, and let the block in — on whatever terms your counsel can live with. That is the part that buys you the room.
It will not hand you a number. Not cost per square foot, not the rent premium, not the operating line, not a payback period. I do not have them, I cannot verify them from where I am writing, and a made-up figure in front of somebody who builds for a living is worse than no figure at all — you would catch it in a minute and rightly stop reading.
So this is an argument, not a pro forma. The pro forma is the next conversation, and it is the one that decides it.
Liability and insurance. Water is the highest-risk amenity you can own, and opening it beyond your residents raises the question sharply. This is a genuine cost and a genuine legal question, and it is the first thing your counsel will say.
Operating expense. Heat, chemicals, ventilation, a mechanical room that must never be neglected, and staffing if the hours are supervised. A pool is not a capital decision with a one-time price; it is a permanent line.
Not every site or pro forma supports it. Some projects genuinely cannot carry it, and a page that pretended otherwise would deserve to be ignored.
The premium may not appear where you want it. Amenity value is famously hard to isolate, and anyone promising you a clean number is selling something.
And the honest one: if it were obviously profitable everywhere, it would already be standard. It isn’t standard, which means either the market is wrong or I am. That is exactly the question worth running the numbers on — and it is why the ask on this page is check it, not believe it.
Why I am the one sending this
I have no pool to sell you, no product, no commission, and no stake in your project. I argue for walkable indoor water because I think it is the cheapest public health infrastructure this country refuses to build, and because I live in a state that is beautiful because of water and short on warm lanes.
I am also the guy whose own building has a pool that sits locked. So I am not theorising about what it costs a person to be near water they cannot get into.
Pour it while the hole is open. That is the whole letter.
If you want the longer argument — the public version, the budget version, the one about who a country builds rooms for — it is all here, cited, and free: the pool, and prisons, not pools.