Forty towers at Scarborough Town Centre. Scarborough's downtown at last?

Scarborough Town Centre was built in 1973 as the centre of a city that was then its own municipality, and for fifty years it has been a mall with a civic centre attached and a great deal of parking. The parking is where the city is going.

Oxford Properties has broken ground on Alta: three rental towers, 1,285 apartments with 268 affordable, $750 million, described as Scarborough’s first major purpose-built rental in a generation and the largest single-phase rental build under construction in Toronto. It is the first piece of a master plan for the whole site that runs to roughly forty towers, two dozen of them between 40 and 65 storeys, a linear central park through the northern half, and three public plazas. The Scarborough subway extension is due to arrive beneath it around 2030, and the busway on the old RT corridor connects to it from September 30.

The question Scarborough has been asked since amalgamation is where its centre is. This is the most concrete answer anyone has offered.

Sources: Oxford Properties, ground broken on a $750-million development · CoStar, Oxford starts construction · Daily Hive, the master plan