Custom home builder in Southport, North Carolina, at the mouth of the Cape Fear.

Here's what Southport decides for your lot.

We build new homes and remodel existing ones here in Southport, our home base.

• In a mapped flood zone, the house must sit three feet above the flood height the map sets.
• In a setback, a hardwood at least 8 inches thick, or a conifer at least 12, needs a permit to come down.
• A new house, or a remodel that changes the footprint, needs a site plan the city signs off on first.

At a glance

County

Brunswick County

Zoning code

Southport's own Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), inside the city limits

Who reviews

The city's UDO Administrator and building inspector; the county, in the former ETJ

Design wind speed

150 mph on every lot in the city (2018 NC Residential Code)

Flood maps

FEMA's Flood Insurance Rate Map, read for each lot on the state's site, fris.nc.gov

Residential Contractor License #109520 · Member, Brunswick County Home Builders Association

What Southport asks for before anything gets built.

Jurisdiction

City of Southport inside the city limits; the former ETJ has been Brunswick County's since August 28, 2024

Adopted code

Southport Unified Development Ordinance (Arts. 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 for a house); Code of Ordinances Ch. 2, Art. IV, Div. 3 for historic review

Who reviews

UDO Administrator (minor site plans, zoning permits); city building inspector (building permits); Floodplain Administrator (Art. 5 permits); Board of Adjustment (special use permits); Historic Preservation Commission (certificates of appropriateness in a locally designated district)

Flood-map source

FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map for the parcel, read through the NC Flood Risk Information System (fris.nc.gov)

Ultimate design wind speed

150 mph east of US 17 (2018 NC Residential Code, Table R301.2(4), footnote c)

CAMA (Coastal Area Management Act)

NC DEQ Division of Coastal Management, along the river and the Intracoastal Waterway. Docks, piers, and bulkheads follow 15A NCAC 07H and Corps setbacks (UDO Sec. 3.6.E).

Inside the city limits, one document carries nearly all of the land-use rules: the Southport Unified Development Ordinance, or UDO. Which of its rules reach a lot depends on the parcel.

The UDO covers review procedures in Article 2 and zoning in Article 3. Flood damage prevention is Article 5, stormwater is Article 6, and definitions are Article 8.

The Historic Preservation Commission's rules sit outside it, in the general Code of Ordinances. They reach a lot only where the city has designated a local historic landmark or district by ordinance.

Since 2024 the city limit is also the edge of the city's authority. The General Assembly relinquished Southport's extraterritorial jurisdiction (the ETJ, land outside the limits that the city once zoned) that July. The land between the old limits and the Duke Energy Canal has been zoned and permitted by Brunswick County since late August of that year. Which ordinance a Southport lot answers to is a parcel-level fact. The county's parcel map settles it.

Most houses in the city sit in one of two base districts, among the thirteen the UDO establishes (Sec. 3.2.A). R-10 is single- and two-family residential, on a 10,000-square-foot minimum lot. R-20 is single- and two-family residential-agricultural, on 20,000 square feet.

For an R-10 lot, Table 3.2 (Sec. 3.9) sets a 75-foot minimum width and a 25-foot front setback. The rear setback is 20 feet, and the side is 8 feet, subject to a table footnote. The height limit is 40 feet. For R-20, the width is 100 feet, with 40 feet at the front, 25 at the rear, and 12 at the side. The height cap stays the same, at 40 feet.

How that height is measured on a house whose lowest floor has been raised for flood is a question for the city's planning staff. It gets settled with them before the elevations are drawn. On an irregular lot, the UDO Administrator decides which yard is which (Sec. 3.9.A.2). A single-family dwelling is permitted by right in both districts. A duplex and a residential accessory dwelling are special uses, which need a permit from the Board of Adjustment (Table 3.1).

A house here has one more step between the drawings and the building permit. Section 2.7.A requires a minor site plan. New single-family and duplex construction needs one. So does any renovation that changes the footprint of an existing structure, and so does any accessory structure, fence, dock, deck, or driveway.

The plan is filed with the building permit application. It is sealed by a North Carolina-licensed surveyor, landscape architect, or engineer (small accessory structures and simple site features are exempt from the seal). The UDO Administrator reviews it within 30 working days of a complete submission, and approval lasts six months. The zoning permit issues on the strength of it, and the city's building inspector issues the building permit.

Water and sewer service inside the city comes through Brunswick County Public Utilities. That removes the well-and-septic question for an in-town lot, though the question stays open on a parcel outside the limits.

Southport's live oaks have their own rules.

Section 3.18 opens by naming its purpose: to manage the city's Urban Maritime Forest and its tree canopy, and protect the signature heritage live oaks. The mechanism is the tree impact permit.

A Regulated Tree is any hardwood 8 inches or more in diameter at breast height, or any conifer 12 inches or more. Where one stands within a setback on a platted residential lot, it needs a permit before it is removed. It needs one before its critical root zone is disturbed, too. That zone is the ground around the trunk the tree needs to stay healthy. A Specimen Tree, 30 inches or more of any species, needs a permit wherever it stands.

Residential lots also carry a retention floor scaled to lot size. That runs from one broadleaf canopy tree on the smallest lots up to five trees at 20,000 square feet and beyond (Sec. 3.18.F.3.a). A new house also needs an as-built tree survey before its certificate of occupancy issues (Sec. 3.18.D.2).

The section is stricter about sequence than about outcome. Nothing over 3 inches in diameter may be cleared before a zoning or tree impact permit issues (Sec. 3.18.I). A violation brings a minimum one-year delay on any city development approval, on top of the per-inch civil penalties in Section 3.18.P.

Where a regulated tree does come down on a one- or two-family lot, mitigation runs at a quarter of the diameter removed. That is a lighter ratio than an inch-for-inch replacement. Replacements must be at least a quarter heritage live oak and at least half canopy trees. A heritage live oak kept standing earns credit at two, three, or four times its diameter, depending on its size (Sec. 3.18.H).

During construction, every protected tree's full critical root zone is fenced at least 4 feet high. No grading, no fill deeper than 3 inches, no material storage, and no concrete washout are allowed inside it (Sec. 3.18.J). The practical answer is to survey the trees before the house is drawn. That is where the site analysis Tropical Tides delivers before design begins on a Southport lot.

Southport is still a river town. The lots show it.

The Cape Fear River pilots take ships up the channel to the Port of Wilmington. They work from a station on Southport's West Bay Street, and two ferries leave from Ferry Road. The old town's grid of short, shaded blocks still holds the small lots its 1792 plat drew. The riverfront, the Yacht Basin, and the marinas hold the wider, more exposed parcels.

Southport began as Smithville. The town was platted in 1792 and named for Benjamin Smith, a state legislator and Senate speaker who was elected governor in 1810. It was the seat of Brunswick County from 1808 until 1975. That year, a county referendum moved the seat inland to its present site near Bolivia. In 1887 the town took the name Southport, in a bid to sell itself as a shipping port. The shipping trade never grew into what the name promised.

The river pilots stayed. Their boats still work from the Bay Street waterfront, alongside the shrimp boats and the Yacht Basin. That is why the town still feels organized around its harbor. Smithville survives as the township name, in the way longtime residents talk, and in the shape of the streets. The town itself grew up around Fort Johnston, an eighteenth-century post at the river mouth. The fort's Garrison House is its one early building still standing. It now holds the Fort Johnston-Southport Museum and Visitors' Center.

That shape matters to anyone buying a lot. The original plat is a compact grid of short blocks. Bay Street runs along the water, Moore a block behind it, and Howe runs inland at right angles to both. Short streets fill the space between them, all under a canopy of live oaks. The city now regulates that canopy as an Urban Maritime Forest.

Lots inside the grid are small by the standard of any modern subdivision. A lot recorded under that plat can fall short of the width or area the current ordinance sets for its district. It stays buildable, under the UDO's rule for nonconforming lots of record. That rule lets a lot recorded before the ordinance serve as a building site for a permitted use (Sec. 3.20.C). The setbacks and every other standard still have to be met. That rule is why an old in-town lot can carry a new house at all. It is the first thing to read when one comes on the market.

The second kind of lot faces the water. Parcels along the river, around the Yacht Basin, and out toward the marinas tend to run deeper and wider than a grid lot. They face the open mouth of the Cape Fear, with Bald Head Island low on the horizon and the shipping channel between. The river is more than a mile across here. Wind arrives over that width with nothing to slow it, and salt travels with it. The flood map takes a closer interest in this ground, too.

A buyer is choosing between two different design problems: a cottage lot on the grid, or a riverfront parcel. The house that comes out of each should look like it knows which one it is.

People come to Southport for plain reasons. It is a town that can be walked end to end, with a harbor that still works. The passenger ferry runs to Bald Head Island, and the state ferry crosses to Fort Fisher. The oak canopy makes July bearable. The grid, the pilots, and the river explain why the lots are shaped the way they are. Every design question on a Southport lot traces back to which of the three shaped it.

The river decides how hard the wind hits.

Every house in Brunswick County is designed to an ultimate design wind speed. Table R301.2(4) of the 2018 NC Residential Code sets it. The table's footnote c draws the county's line at US 17: 140 mph to the west, 150 mph to the east. Southport lies entirely on the coast side. So 150 mph applies on every lot in the city, from the Bay Street waterfront to the last parcel before the county's zoning begins. That number sets the structural baseline.

How hard the wind reaches a given wall depends on what stands between it and the water. The code's exposure categories (Sec. R301.2.1.4) settle that, one direction at a time. Two blocks into the grid, under the oaks, a house has neighbors and canopy on most sides. It usually reads as sheltered. On the Bay Street waterfront, the same house faces more than a mile of open river on one side. It takes the wind straight off the water there, and stays sheltered on the others. The structural engineer sets the category for each direction, as part of the design. It is one of the first things the site analysis writes down.

Because the wind speed here clears 130 mph, Section R301.2.1.1 requires every house to be designed under one of the methods it lists. They include the Wood Frame Construction Manual, ICC 600, ASCE 7, the building code, and the residential code's high-wind and coastal chapters (45 and 46). A load path is the chain of connections that carries wind loads from the roof down to the foundation. In Southport, a load path designed to one of those methods is the minimum on every lot.

The same 150 mph designation brings every house in the city under Chapter 46 of the NC Residential Code. That is the state's coastal and flood construction chapter. Section R4601.1 applies it throughout the 150 mph wind zone, and also in coastal high hazard, ocean hazard, and regulatory floodplain areas. On a Southport lot, it governs whether or not the flood map touches the parcel. The case for a coastal-specific standard is that salt, pressure, humidity, and sun are design inputs. On this waterfront, that reads as a plain description of ordinary conditions.

Then there's the flood zone.

The flood map is the other document that shapes a Southport house. It is read parcel by parcel. A Special Flood Hazard Area is land with at least a 1 percent chance of flooding in any year. Where the FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map places a lot in one, the UDO's Article 5 sets the height the house has to reach. The regulatory flood protection elevation is the Base Flood Elevation plus three feet of freeboard. Where no BFE has been published, it is at least three feet above the highest adjacent grade instead (Sec. 5.5). The Base Flood Elevation is the flood height the map sets, and freeboard is the extra height the city adds above it.

New construction and substantial improvement must bring the reference level up to that elevation (Sec. 5.20.A). A substantial improvement is work on an existing house that costs half its market value or more within a year. The reference level is the top of the lowest floor in an A or AE zone. In a VE zone, where the map expects storm waves, it is the bottom of the lowest horizontal structural member. Whatever sits below it is limited to parking, access, and storage. It has to use flood-resistant materials, with at least two flood openings on different sides, sized to the enclosed area (Sec. 5.20.D).

The city's floodplain program dates its own history in the definitions. The first floodplain ordinance was adopted in May 1974, and the initial FIRM took effect in April 1977. That is the line between pre-FIRM and post-FIRM houses downtown.

A lot the map places in a Coastal High Hazard Area carries a further set of rules (Sec. 5.24). Construction has to sit landward of the reach of mean high tide and the first line of stable natural vegetation. It has to meet the applicable CAMA setback, too. The foundation is a pile or column, engineered for wind and water acting together, with no fill allowed for structural support. A non-conversion agreement has to be recorded with the county before the permit issues. That is the owner's recorded promise to leave the space below the lowest floor unfinished. The section also calls for a V-Zone certification from an engineer or architect.

Along the river and the Intracoastal Waterway, the state's coastal shoreline Areas of Environmental Concern add a CAMA layer of their own. The width of that shoreline band, and the limits inside it, come from the Coastal Resources Commission's rules. The Division of Coastal Management is the office to confirm them with. These lines come from the FIRM panel for the parcel, read through the NC Flood Risk Information System, and from the parcel's own survey.

Salt is the constant underneath all of it. Onshore wind carries ocean spray between Bald Head Island and Caswell Beach, up the river mouth, and across open water to the Bay Street waterfront. It carries well past the shoreline, too. Airborne chloride settles every day on the fasteners, the hurricane connectors, and the condensing unit of a house that will never see a wave.

Hardware, connectors, and outdoor equipment should be chosen for salt carried up the river mouth. That goes for a house three blocks in, under the oaks, as much as for one on Bay Street.

Before we draw anything, we read the lot.

Before a Southport project has a drawing, it has a written site analysis. It is delivered to the client and filed as the first entry in their online project file. On this ground, it answers a specific set of questions:

• The parcel's flood zone from the FIRM, and the reference level that follows from it.
• The exposure category, by direction.
• The trees Section 3.18 regulates, and where their root zones fall.
• How the sun crosses the lot under the canopy, in January and again in July.
• Where water goes when it rains.
• Which sightlines toward the river or the basin deserve glass.
• Whether the historic district, the ETJ transfer, or a CAMA shoreline touches the lot at all.

Every design decision that follows is expected to trace back to something in it.

On a grid lot, the tree survey usually carries the most weight. It constrains the footprint before the setbacks do. The survey maps which oaks meet the regulated or specimen definitions, and which stand inside a setback. It also maps which critical root zones a foundation, a driveway, or a utility trench would cross. That has to happen before the plan is drawn.

A heritage live oak found in the way at permit stage is a redesign. One designed around from the start earns mitigation credit, and keeps the shade that made the lot worth buying. The as-built survey the city requires before occupancy is easier to pass, too, when the design never asked the trees to move.

Drainage gets equally early attention, for a practical reason. The grid was platted long before curb and gutter. How water leaves a particular block is closer to a lot-level fact than a citywide rule.

The UDO's stormwater article, adopted in September 2025, reaches ordinary house construction through its definition of minor development. That is 800 square feet or more of new impervious surface, or more than 2,000 square feet of disturbance. Impervious surface is hard surface, such as roof and paving. A project that size is asked for erosion and sediment control, and infiltration measures sized to the new impervious area. It is also asked for soil testing for permeability and the seasonal high water table, and a recorded maintenance agreement (Sec. 6.2.B).

How the city applies that to a single house is a conversation with the planning office. Knowing where the lot drains, and where the water table sits, before design starts, is what keeps that conversation short.

How close the neighbors sit

In R-10 the side setback is 8 feet, and in R-20 it is 12. That puts a neighbor's roofline nearer the property line than a buyer from a larger-lot subdivision expects. The analysis maps that relationship along with the rest:

• Where the neighboring eaves and gutters fall.
• Where a retained oak will shade a wall at three in the afternoon.
• Which windows would look at the river, and which at siding.

On a riverfront parcel, the same exercise turns outward. It maps the fetch, the open water the wind crosses before it reaches the lot, and the CAMA line. It shows where a dock or bulkhead can sit, under the UDO's use standards and the state's rules (Sec. 3.6.E). It also covers the riverfront-garage exception that changes where a garage can go. The deliverable is the same either way: a document the client can read, argue with, and keep.

A live oak found in the way at permit stage is a redesign. One designed around from the start is shade.

The same standard on the river and under the oaks.

Stand on a waterfront lot along Bay Street with a storm coming in, and the river makes the case before anyone names a standard. More than a mile of open water stretches out from the lot, with nothing on it to slow the wind. The house's roof edge, sheathing, and wall-to-foundation connections take the full pull of that fetch.

On a lot like that, the load path is a literal thing. It runs through the roof-edge detail, the sheathing fastening schedule, and the strap from rafter to stud to sill to foundation. Each one carries the uplift the river will apply.

Every Tropical Tides project pursues the FORTIFIED Gold designation against that load. It is the top tier of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety's program. An independent evaluator checks the work. An evaluator with no stake in the design is what makes the designation worth writing down, and many insurers recognize it.

Airtightness has its own argument on this ground. An August afternoon at the river mouth pushes air close to saturation against every unsheltered face of a house. A leaky envelope is how that air finds a cool surface inside a wall.

So every project is drawn to a design target of sub-1.0 ACH50. That is fewer than one air change per hour, with the house held at a 50-pascal pressure difference. Holding it takes an air barrier traced through every junction: each window rough opening, each penetration, each place where roof, wall, and floor meet. Sub-1.0 ACH50 Without Stuffy Interiors sets out how that tightness pairs with ventilation, so the house does not go stale.

Until the test runs, the target is a line in the drawings and nothing more. The blower door is a calibrated fan that measures air leakage. It goes into an exterior doorway of the client's own finished house, before the keys change hands. The figure it reads becomes the airtightness number that house is described by.

Shade is good for people and hard on walls.

Shade is one of the better reasons to buy a grid lot. It is also a variable a wall has to dry against. An elevation shaded most of the day by a retained live oak never gets the solar drive a sunlit wall gets. That drive is what pulls moisture out of cladding and sheathing. So the shaded wall relies more on its drainage plane, its ventilated cavity, and the house's mechanical dehumidification, and less on the sun.

Planning for moisture before it appears is the general case. A north wall under an oak canopy, three blocks from the river, is the Southport-specific one. It is decided elevation by elevation, on the specific lot.

The shade that makes a grid lot pleasant in July is the shade its north wall has to dry against.

The mechanical system comes last in that sequence. It is sized from a room-by-room load calculation for the specific house. A tight envelope under a live oak canopy carries a modest sensible load and a persistent latent one. The sensible load is heat, and the latent load is moisture in the air. Equipment picked from square footage alone will satisfy the thermostat well before it has dealt with the humidity.

Sometimes the calculation shows the latent load outrunning what the cooling equipment removes on its own. There, the whole-house moisture strategy adds dedicated dehumidification, and the cooling unit stays sized to the house. These are design targets. FORTIFIED Gold is pursued, and an independent evaluator checks the work. Sub-1.0 ACH50 stays a design target until the blower door on that house reports the number.

New construction in Southport starts with which lot you have.

New homes in Southport, on the grid or on the river

Custom homes on Southport lots take one of two forms. The first is infill: a new home on a grid lot. It works inside the setbacks of Table 3.2, or, where the lot predates them, inside the nonconforming-lot-of-record allowance in Section 3.20.C. It works around the trees Section 3.18 regulates, too, often beside a house built before any of these rules existed.

The second form is a house on a riverfront or marina-area parcel. There, the lot is larger, and the wind, flood, and CAMA questions carry more of the weight. The design comes out of the site in both cases. A plan drawn for a flat open lot somewhere else has no answer for a specimen oak in the side setback. It has no answer for a VE line at the back fence, either. Reading the parcel before drawing it is the first phase of the work. The minor site plan the city requires is one of its outputs.

If the house is already standing

Renovating an older Southport house carries a layer new construction does not. Much of the housing downtown is old enough to have been built under no floodplain rule at all. The UDO treats a house begun before May 1974 as an existing building, and a house built before April 1977 as pre-FIRM. It treats repairs, additions, or improvements as a substantial improvement once their cumulative cost within a year reaches half the structure's market value. That improvement must then meet new-construction flood standards (Sec. 5.20.E). Any renovation that changes the footprint needs a minor site plan.

Where the lot sits inside a locally designated historic district, exterior work needs a certificate of appropriateness before the building permit. That is the Historic Preservation Commission's design approval. It covers new construction, alteration, repair, and even fences, steps, and pavement. A permit issued without that certificate is invalid (Code of Ordinances Sec. 2-199). Staff may approve minor works. The full commission has 90 days to act on a complete application, and a certificate is good for 180 days.

For a historic structure in the floodplain, the Board of Adjustment may grant a variance for repair or rehabilitation that keeps the building's designation. First, though, the board tells the applicant in writing that building below the BFE raises flood insurance premiums (Sec. 5.18). Bringing an older Southport house to a tighter envelope and a drier wall is the kind of work the practice designs and directs. The aim is to keep what made the house worth keeping.

An ADU in Southport goes to a public hearing.

Table 3.1 lists a residential accessory dwelling as a special use in R-10 and R-20. That classification shapes the whole path. An accessory dwelling on a city lot goes to the Board of Adjustment as a quasi-judicial hearing. That is a hearing the board decides on the evidence, much as a court would. Notice gets mailed to abutting owners, and posted on the lot. Before it can approve one, the board must make four written findings (Sec. 2.7.C):

• The use poses no material danger to public health or safety.
• Every required condition is met.
• Adjoining property is not adversely affected.
• The use is in harmony with the area and the comprehensive plan.

The application carries its own minor site plan, which a licensed professional may prepare but need not (Sec. 2.7.C.3.a). An approved permit is recorded with the county, and lapses if unused within twelve months. Once granted, Section 3.6.C sets the shape:

• One accessory dwelling per deeded lot, within, attached to, or detached from a principal single-family house. It stays under the same owner, sharing its driveway, with a parking space of its own.
• An 800-square-foot cap on the unit; where it sits over a detached garage, a 530-square-foot cap on the garage's ground floor.
• A detached unit behind the front building line, riverfront lots excepted, and at least 5 feet from any adjoining lot line.

The riverfront exception is Southport's own. Section 3.6.A permits a detached garage in the street front yard, on an R-10 lot with Cape Fear River frontage. It has to stay at least 75 feet from the right-of-way. R-10 and R-20 lots, in general, are limited to two accessory structures. Those structures can cover no more than half the rear yard, and rise no more than 30 feet.

On a deep river lot, that exception lets the garage, and any unit above it, move toward the street and away from the water. The ordinance sets the envelope, and the specific lot decides what fits inside it. The coastal questions an ADU raises, elevation, salt, and the tightness of a very small envelope, get answered on the specific parcel. The planning office confirms how each standard reads there.

We're based here, and so is the permit counter.

Tropical Tides is based in Southport. For a client here, the practice, the lot, and the permit counter share one small city. A site visit during design or construction is an errand of minutes.

Inside the limits, that counter is the planning and inspections office at City Hall, 1029 North Howe Street. The minor site plan goes in there with the building permit application, and the zoning and building permits come back out. The Board of Adjustment and the Historic Preservation Commission are city boards, too. A special use hearing for an accessory dwelling, or a certificate of appropriateness for exterior work, stays in town as well.

A lot in the former ETJ changes the errand. Its zoning and building permits go through Brunswick County instead, at the central permitting office in Building I of the county government center in Bolivia. County inspectors walk its footings and framing.

Along the river and the waterway, a third authority enters: the state's Division of Coastal Management. The UDO requires every dock, pier, and bulkhead in the city to meet the Division's CAMA use standards (Sec. 3.6.E). Knowing which of those three a lot answers to, and in what order, is part of the first site visit.

What being close actually changes

Working in the same town means someone from the practice is standing on the lot for more decisions. For example:

• The tree-protection fencing, checked before the excavator arrives.
• The flashing sequence at a river-facing window, watched as it goes in.
• The framing detail that reads fine on paper and wrong in the sun, caught mid-build.

On a Southport project, that difference is measured in minutes. It shows up in how closely the finished detail matches the drawn one.

Proximity also changes what the project record holds. The site analysis, the tree survey, and the minor site plan would be the same documents from any distance. On a Southport project, though, more of the entries are made in person. The root-zone fence gets photographed the morning it goes up. The flood openings get counted against the drawing before the enclosure below the house is finished.

When a Southport lot is in view, an inquiry that names the parcel lets the first conversation be about that lot. That means its oaks, its flood panel, and which counter it answers to. Tropical Tides holds NC Residential Contractor License #109520, and belongs to the Brunswick County Home Builders Association. The practice answers at 910-946-5512. Each build is partner-executed under the practice's direction, and recorded in the client's private workspace.

A Southport address can sit outside Southport.

A Southport address covers more ground than the city limits. Indigo Plantation and its marina sit on the waterfront where the river meets the Intracoastal Waterway. That area straddles the city limit and land that was the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction until 2024.

The ferry to Bald Head Island once left from Indigo's own marina. It now runs from Deep Point Marina on Ferry Road, a passenger crossing of roughly twenty minutes. Which ordinance an Indigo-area parcel answers to is a parcel-level fact. It is also one that has changed recently enough to check twice.

The 2024 transfer made that literal along the approaches. The General Assembly relinquished Southport's extraterritorial jurisdiction effective July 1, 2024. By the county's count at the time, that covered 615 parcels and roughly 1,900 acres. The land ran north, east, and west of the city limits, out to the Duke Energy Canal. It included much of the frontage along NC 211 and NC 87. That land received Brunswick County zoning that August, and building permits and planning applications moved to the county on August 28.

A lot on those roads that reads as Southport is now reviewed under the county's Unified Development Ordinance. County planning staff and county inspections handle it. The county's parcel map is where that status gets confirmed, before a design assumes either code.

Neighbors by road and by ferry

Southport is a hub of ferries and short drives. Several of the communities in the practice's three-county service area sit across the water from it. The state's Southport–Fort Fisher ferry crosses the river mouth from its own terminal on Ferry Road to the Kure Beach side, first come, first served. The Bald Head passenger ferry leaves from Deep Point.

By road, NC 211 runs northwest from Howe Street, past St. James, toward US 17. NC 133 turns south for the bridge to Oak Island. NC 87 runs inland through Boiling Spring Lakes toward Wilmington, about forty-five minutes away.

• Oak Island sits across the Intracoastal Waterway to the southwest. There, the same 150 mph wind zone meets a barrier-island lot and a canal instead of a river mouth.
• Caswell Beach, its own town at the eastern end of Oak Island, facing the mouth of the Cape Fear.
• St. James, a gated town along NC 211, where the community's architectural review generally sits on top of the town's code.
• Kure Beach, across the river by the state ferry, in New Hanover County and under its own town code.
• Winnabow, inland up NC 87 toward the US 17 corridor, zoned and permitted by Brunswick County.

Every one of them is close enough that the practice can walk a Southport lot in the morning and an Oak Island lot after lunch. The conditions change from place to place (canal frontage, dune line, ferry logistics, county review), and the design changes with them. The site analysis, the standard it feeds, and the workspace that holds both stay the same.