Accessibility has been the key to 50 years of home building for Bowling Green area developer Rick Metz.

When Metz began building in 1970 the need for affordable housing defined the accessibility concept, it evolved to include the ability for the residents to age in place and utilize the property. Now affordability is returning as the accessibility issue.

The company is called Rick Metz Developer and it now has more than 300 homes in the Bowling Green area to Metz’s credit. He also started residential developments, providing various forms of neighborhood infrastructure, that other builders have also used for additional housing.

“I’ve been building since 1970, or 51 years. You know, Bowling Green is only 185 years old, so that’s more than a quarter of the time that Bowling Green has existed,” Metz said.

Metz said he did the first planned unit development in Bowling Green, the Four Meadows Commons, which he modeled after developments he saw being built in Florida. The concept was affordability.

In 1979 he was able to borrow over $1 million to fund his first subdivision project.

“I was 29 years old and it was the largest loan that First Federal Savings had ever made to one person,” Metz said of the former bank. “It showed a lot of faith in one person to make that kind of commitment.”

The 70 units that he built on the property are located off West Gypsy Lane Road.

“I’m proud of that first. It has stood the test of time,” Metz said of the condominium complex. “We had a similar situation to what we have right now, with the inflationary spike, with 20-21% in the late 1970s. It was a very difficult and challenging time.”

He said that the bank worked with him in an almost partnership type situation.

Today, he said that the walking access to Walmart is seen as a positive factor when people purchase in the neighborhood, along with the Slippery Elm Trail.

After interest rates went down in the 1980s his building projects increased dramatically.

The trail figured into a future development as well, the last subdivision he built, Slippery Elm Hollow has direct links onto the trail, for which he worked with the Wood County Park District to create the concept.

“So people who live there can drive their bikes directly onto that, without ever having to go on a road. The bike trail is sort of like a (bicycle) superhighway. There are now two more adjacent developments on it, linking it to more than 150 houses,” Metz said.

He said that nationally, houses that are on a bike trail bring more value than houses that are on a golf course.

Between those two projects, Metz built the first 40 of the 100 houses in the Ashbury Hills neighborhood in the 1990s and then did properties in Pheasant Run.

Today he is working on a house in Stone Ridge, which he said is on the last lot on the first plat — 25 years after he built the first house in the neighborhood.

The emerging trend he has seen in residential building is greater needs for aging-in-place building concepts.

“It’s no secret. I know when I will be 85,” Metz said. “At the nursing home where my mom was, there were roughly 80 residents and all but two were in wheelchairs. That did change the way we’re building houses.”

All of the last five houses he has built have been wheelchair accessible. He makes sure to put full bathrooms on the first floor.

“That’s where all the challenge is, with the bathroom,” Metz said.

He said that there have been a lot of innovations in making accessible utilities, like roll-in showers and sinks and toilets that can be used by a wider variety of people that want to remain in their houses as they age.

What Metz sees as the bigger issue for the industry is a lack of housing inventory and the rapidly increasing prices that have accelerated during the pandemic.

“What’s coming here is you are going to see housing inflation like you have never seen in home building before. It’s started, but it’s really starting to escalate, as we see wages in factories and other businesses starting to go from $12 per hour to $20 and $30 per hour. Once that factors into the whole manufacturing process, and the products they produce, it will start to figure into the inflation in new housing,” Metz said.

He compared the cycle to what he experienced in the early 1970s.

“In this area, where we have a lot of average people with middle class wages, new housing is just going to outprice what the average person will be able to afford to buy, and I find that very distressing,” Metz said.