Monday’s opening of a realigned River Road will be followed by construction of some of the first buildings in the 1,400-acre RiverLights community.

“We will go vertical with two of the buildings in Marina Village in a couple of months. It’ll be a mixed-use building, which will house our welcome center. It will have retail on the bottom. There will be two floors of for-lease units above,” said Livian Jones, vice president of operations for RiverLights, a Newland Communities development expected, at full build-out, to add 2,400 homes and thousands of square feet of commercial space to the city of Wilmington.

Jones talked about some of the latest information available on the development of RiverLights before a ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday at the RiverLights Lake Bridge on River Road. She said the Marina Village will include 41 townhomes, a village green for concerts and other events and a marina, as well as a bar and restaurant that Jones referred to as The River House. That name could change, Jones said, depending on who the owner/operator turns out to be, something that has yet to be determined.

“We’re talking to several different people right now,” Jones said. “We’re talking to a lot of commercial and retail folks for the spots next to us in our welcome center, that whole first floor and the other parcels in Marina Village.”

Marina Village will be open to the public, Jones said. "We want the public to come. We want people from out of state to come and visit and enjoy what we have to offer."

Although RiverLights, as part of its plan, is entitled to develop up to 1 million square feet of commercial space, the project will likely include less than 300,000, Jones said. As for the rest of the commercial pieces other than the River House, “we will let it happen as the market dictates. But we wanted to activate Marina Village to have a destination and create a place on the [Cape Fear River],” she said.

In February, RiverLights is expected to announce the eight builders Newland is working with on the development’s first home sites -- seven firms that are locally based or have local offices that will build the first conventional neighborhood and a national builder that will be in charge of an age-qualified neighborhood for residents 55 and older. The 40-acre RiverLights Lake was under construction Monday, surrounded on either side of the bridge by the neighborhood sites.

“Builders will start building [homes] in April, and hopefully this time next year we’ll have residents living here and commercial and retail,” Jones said.

Wilmington Chamber of Commerce president Connie Majure-Rhett and Wilmington major Bill Saffo were among other officials to speak during the celebration Monday morning.

“It is great to be the mayor of the city of Wilmington during these great times,” Saffo said. “I mean, we were just at Vertex the other day with 30 railcars coming out of the building there. Downtown in the next 24 months is going to have more construction than you’ve seen in 100 years in downtown Wilmington. This, RiverLights, is going to be one of the largest – it will be the largest neighborhood in the city. It’s going to be bigger than Landfall.”

The section of River Road bisecting the RiverLights property was rebuilt and enhanced as part of the community’s overall master-plan design, according to marketing materials in advance of Monday’s opening. New features include traffic circles, streetlights, a new 45-mph speed limit and wide, landscaped medians. The work started Sept. 8. 

“When Newland Communities came to the city to do a voluntary annexation, we knew that we had to get it right. And working with our planning staff, with the developers, with the engineers, with all of the people that were involved with this project, I believe that we did get it right,” Saffo said Monday before the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “It is going to be a magnificent neighborhood.”

The RiverLights community is owned by a business entity of North America Sekisui House LLC (NASH), one of 30 assets the NASH-Newland Communities partnership owns or manages together in 14 states across the U.S.