The RiversEdge development on Jacksonville’s Downtown Southbank reached a milestone recently with move-ins of the first residents at the 32-acre property.
Downtown Investment Authority CEO Lori Boyer confirmed April 28 that residents were moving into town homes on the site, which has been the subject of redevelopment proposals dating to a decade ago.
Pennsylvania-based Toll Brothers has completed a set of town homes along Prudential Drive and is building more.
Toll Brothers’ website lists four properties as sold and identifies five more as “quick move-in homes” that range from $694,995 to $843,990 and are either immediately available or will be ready for occupancy by June 2025. Four of those five are 1,844 square feet, and the other 2,085 square feet. All are three or four stories with two-car garages, with varying numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms and half-baths.
The site map shows 40 total home lots along Prudential Drive and Reddington Street, which parallels Prudential to the south.
Toll Brothers began the first residential development at RiversEdge on a 2.76-acre lot for which an affiliate, Toll Southeast LP Co. Inc., paid $4.095 million. The seller was Elements Development of Jacksonville LLC, which has been controlled since 2020 by RiversEdge site developer Preston Hollow Community Capital LLC of Dallas.
Preston Hollow is not the RiversEdge’s vertical developer of the project, but rather markets the individual property parcels to developers.
The residential properties are an element of a proposed mixed-use development that includes retail and restaurants, office space, a hotel, a public marina and 4 acres of new riverfront park space to the property east of the Duval County Public Schools headquarters.
The $693 million RiversEdge mixed-use project is on the former site of the JEA Southside Generating Plant, which operated from 1947 to 2001. The city utility spent upward of $28 million decommissioning the facility and doing environmental cleanup on soil and groundwater contamination stemming from its operation as a fuel oil and natural gas-fired electric generating station.
In 2014, Elements Development submitted a winning bid on the property to JEA. That same year, the DIA granted development rights on the property to Elements, which released renderings showing first-phase plans for 500 apartments and condominiums, 200 hotel rooms, 200,000 square feet of office space and more than 94,000 square feet of retail and commercial space.
At that time, the proposed development was called Healthy Town and was promoted as a planned community based on an active lifestyle and the site’s proximity to Southbank hospitals and health care facilities.
The name was later changed to The District, then RiversEdge: Life on the St. Johns.
Under a second amended redevelopment agreement approved by Council in 2023, the RiversEdge development would include 1,170 residential units, 200 hotel rooms and 121,400 square feet of retail space.
That amended agreement increased a Recapture Enhanced Value grant from the city for the project to $97,986,000 from $41,961,000. The grant is a 75% rebate on property taxes that will be generated by the development through 2045.
According to DIA documents, the amendment was spurred by an increase in construction costs since the original agreement in 2018. Costs rose from $280 million to $693 million.
DIA staff calculated in 2023 that RiversEdge would generate at least $130.7 million in ad valorem property taxes during the term of the agreement, of which nearly $98 million would be refunded.
In other news about RiversEdge, Boyer said April 28 that the parks are substantially completed and are expected to open by late May pending the finalization of agreements for maintenance and programming between the city and Preston Hollow.
The parks comprise:
• Central Park, a riverfront park that will face the St. Johns River and feature a pavilion, amphitheater, adjacent plaza area, trees and an art installation. Central Park will be flanked by Northwest and Northeast parks.
• Northwest Park, which will have a combination of durable synthetic turf, swings, game table area, benches and bike racks.
• Northeast Park, or Fitness Park, will include two playgrounds and a yoga lawn.
• Marshfront Park, on the east side of the development, will include a winding path through native plants, an herb garden and a synthetic lawn.