Brunswick County planning officials are set to consider a proposed development that would include more than 1,100 residential units near Southport.

Formerly called Project Indigo, the project has been in the works for several years and would have a mix of housing, including apartments and a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), said McKay Siegel of East West Partners. 

Bald Head Island Limited and East West Partners proposed the nearly 400-acre, $565 million project in 2020. Instead of Indigo, they’re now calling it Waterway.

In August, city of Southport officials announced that the city had transferred to Brunswick County all inspection, permit and application requests for new building, planning and/or zoning projects within Southport’s extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ), impacting nearly 330 acres of the site for Waterway.

East West and BHI Ltd. had submitted a master plan and rezoning request for the project, also referred to at the time as phase two of the area’s existing Indigo Plantation, to the city’s planning board in 2022. The plan received pushback from residents and officials and the developers withdrew it.

Now the plan is back on the table with discussions taking place between the developers and the city and county. The Brunswick County Planning Board will hold a public hearing on the developers’ request for a planned development designation at its Dec. 9 meeting.

“One of the things the planned development allows us to do is to not have the same house over and over and over again,” Siegel said. 

The breakdown for the planned development, according to the planning board agenda, is 400 single-family lots, 200 cottages/duplexes/townhomes, 500 multifamily units and 100,000 square feet of commercial use. Siegel envisions a potential range of townhomes from the mid- to high-$300,000s up to $2 million homes on large lots.

East West and BHI Ltd. would likely bring on several custom home builders, a couple of groups for the townhome and duplex products and a small group of local builders, he said. Some of the neighborhoods could have architectural review boards.

Siegel said, “We’ll have a pretty stringent set of architectural guidelines that will make our architecture look like it belongs in Southport.”

Eventually, the development could be annexed into the city after East West, BHI Ltd. and the city of Southport enter into a development agreement. The developers estimate they could be working on the development’s infrastructure, such as utilities, toward the end of 2025, Siegel said.