Scarborough: the bluffs, the boom, and the most attainable 416

Scarborough begins, fittingly, with a view. In the 1790s Elizabeth Simcoe — wife of Upper Canada's first lieutenant-governor and a sharp diarist — looked up at the white cliffs rising from Lake Ontario and was reminded of Scarborough, the seaside town in Yorkshire. The name stuck to the bluffs, then to the township, then to a third of modern Toronto. The cliffs are still there, and so is the sense that Scarborough has always been a little apart from the city it now belongs to.

Origins

For its first century Scarborough was farm country: a scattering of agricultural townships east of the Don River, with small crossroads communities and the dramatic Scarborough Bluffs falling away to the lake along its southern edge. Growth was slow and rural, shaped by the concession-road grid that still underlies its street pattern. Well into the twentieth century it remained mostly fields and orchards, a place city dwellers visited rather than lived.

How it grew

Then came the postwar wave. Like North York to the west, Scarborough filled rapidly in the 1950s, 60s and 70s with subdivisions of detached homes, apartment slabs and the shopping plazas that defined mid-century suburban life. It became a borough and then, in 1983, a city within Metropolitan Toronto. The Scarborough Rapid Transit line — the quirky, often-maligned elevated "RT" that opened in 1985 — linked Scarborough Town Centre to the subway at Kennedy and symbolized the area's ambitions, even as it became famous for breaking down. In 1998 Scarborough was folded, along with the rest of Metro, into the amalgamated City of Toronto, losing its own city hall but keeping its strong local identity.

Character & culture

If one thing defines modern Scarborough, it's diversity. Successive waves of immigration made it one of the most multicultural places in Canada, and that shows up most deliciously in its food — the Scarborough stretch of nominally suburban plazas hides some of the best Sri Lankan, Hakka Chinese, Filipino, Caribbean and South Asian cooking in the country. Beyond the table, the area offers the Bluffs and their parkland, the Rouge — Canada's first national urban park — and the Toronto Zoo. It is suburban in form but deeply urban in mix.

From history to today's prices

Scarborough's relative distance from the core and its abundance of postwar housing stock have kept it the most attainable part of old Toronto. The same geography that once made it farm country — room to spread out, away from the harbour — now makes it the value option for buyers who still want a Toronto address.

Figures mirror the interactive regional map on our home page; see the methodology for how qualifying income is derived.

At about $780 per square foot, Scarborough is the cheapest condo market on the map, and its roughly $131,000 qualifying income is the lowest bar to clear inside the 416 — nearly $50,000 less than downtown. Even a detached house, at a little over $1 million, asks for a qualifying income around $232,000, well below the central-city equivalents. For buyers priced out of the core, Scarborough is often the difference between owning inside Toronto and not owning at all.

What it means for buyers today

Scarborough rewards buyers willing to trade a longer commute for more space and a lower price — and with the long-awaited subway extension replacing the old RT, that commute is set to improve. It remains the most realistic entry to homeownership within the city proper. Run your income through the affordability calculator to see how much further it stretches here than downtown, and read our income percentile analysis to see where you stand.