If you have driven past the old Scarborough Downs racetrack anytime in the last few years, you already know the shape of the story: fences, graders, a grid of new roads that led to buildings that were not there yet. That kind of construction stretches out. You watch it for months and it barely seems to move. Then, sometime this summer, it stopped being slow.
In roughly eight weeks this July, Verizon, NBT Bank and Maine Community Bank all signed leases inside The Downs' new town center, joining a Market Basket that developers have said will open sometime this fall, which by the calendar means any week now. That is not a downtown filling in gradually, one storefront at a time, the way these things usually go. It is a downtown that spent nearly twenty years being planned and permitted and financed, and is now arriving on what looks a lot like a release schedule.
That compression is the actual story here, more than any single tenant. Scarborough has never had a traditional downtown. The town's own comprehensive plan first called for building one back in 2006. What is happening on Market Street this fall is the payoff of that two-decade gap, and it is worth understanding both what is already open and what changes for people who already live here.
What Was Already There
Before the town center broke ground, The Downs was mostly known for two things that had nothing to do with a walkable downtown. Costco opened off Payne Road in 2023, Maine's first location, and a later study found it draws nearly two million shoppers a year to the surrounding businesses. Next to it sits the Innovation District, home to more than fifty companies including IDEXX, tucked into what used to be pasture and racetrack backstretch.
Then in August 2025, Allagash Brewing opened its second location, The Allagash Bungalow, at 10 Market Street. It is a 175-seat tasting room with a kitchen run by Bite Into Maine, serving the same lobster rolls the truck has served at food trucks around Portland and Cape Elizabeth for years, just now with a permanent address and a seasonal patio. That was the first sign the actual town center, not just the business park around it, had a pulse.
The Eight Weeks That Filled In the Rest
The news that made this a current story, not a years-old one, came out of a mid-July announcement covered by the Portland Press Herald. In quick succession:
- Verizon leased street-level retail space in The Breakaway, a new mixed-use building on Scarborough Downs Road with 76 one- and two-bedroom apartments on the four floors above it. Construction started in May 2026.
- NBT Bank leased space at 72 Market Street, next door to the incoming Market Basket, marking its second branch in Maine.
- Maine Community Bank bought commercial condo space at 4 Market Street, near the Allagash tasting room, a nail salon and a fitness studio.
- InterMed is finishing a medical office building expected to open later this year, its sixth location in Greater Portland.
More than 240,000 square feet of commercial space is under construction in the town center right now, and as of that July report, 70 percent of it was already leased or purchased. For a project that spent most of two decades on paper, that is a fast turn from empty buildings to signed tenants.
Travis Kennedy, who chairs the Scarborough Economic Development Corporation, put the ambition in plain terms at a July event marking the milestone:
"It will be an open walking community space that will give us that thing that our town has wanted for, well, probably for centuries, which is a central home sort of beating heart for all of Scarborough."
That is a large claim for a bank branch and a Verizon store. But taken together with the grocery anchor, the medical building and the housing above it, it starts to look less like a shopping center and more like an actual attempt at a Main Street, built from a blank slate instead of restored from an old one.
The Change That Actually Touches Your Routine
Most of what is landing at The Downs is new to Scarborough. One piece is not. Café Luna, which has operated on Route 1 for years, is relocating into The Breakaway building in spring 2027, according to the same July report. That means the Route 1 location residents already know is closing, not adding a second spot, moving.
For anyone who has a standing order there or drives past it on the way to the beach, that is the one detail in all of this that changes an actual habit rather than just adding a new option to try. It also says something about how the developers are filling the town center. They are not only recruiting national brands with real estate budgets built for expansion. They are pulling in a business the town already trusts and relocating it to the address that is supposed to become the town's new center of gravity.
Why It Took Twenty Years to Get Here
The math on how this land sat idle for so long is its own piece of the story. When M&R Development bought the former racetrack site in 2018, it was valued at less than $8 million and generated only $146,000 a year in property tax revenue for the town, according to NEREJ's reporting on the project's approvals. Before that, the property had been under contract seventeen separate times and fell through every time, almost always because the buyer wanted to build a casino or a hotel complex, not the kind of mixed-use neighborhood Scarborough's comprehensive plan had already called for back in 2006.
What eventually worked was not a bigger vision. It was a smaller amount of uncertainty. The zoning already matched what the town wanted, so the developer was not asking anyone to change their mind about what should go there, only funding what had already been agreed to. M&R has put roughly $85 million of private money into public infrastructure on the site, building roads and running utilities to land the town had never served before, and the state's most extensive local traffic overhaul, an $18 million project addressing 37 intersections across Scarborough, Gorham and South Portland, is being run through the same development.
None of that shows up when you are picking up a lobster roll at the Bungalow. But it explains why this specific stretch of Market Street is the one that finally became a downtown, after seventeen other plans for the same acreage never made it past a signature.
The Detail Worth Knowing Before You Drive By
The Downs sits on the footprint of a harness racing track that ran continuously from 1950 to 2020, and the developers are marking that history rather than erasing it. A local artist is painting a mural on The Breakaway building, the same one where Café Luna and Verizon are moving in, depicting the track's seventy years of operation. It is a small gesture, easy to miss next to a bank branch and an apartment building, but it is the one piece of the project that is explicitly about what used to be there rather than what is coming.
What This Fall Actually Looks Like
If the timeline holds, by the time the leaves are down in Scarborough, the town center will have an operating grocery store for the first time, an open medical office, three financial institutions, an established brewery and restaurant, and a relocated neighborhood favorite either open or under construction. More than 700 housing units have already been built across the broader Downs property, out of a projected 2,000, mixing single-family homes, apartments, townhouses, senior housing and tiny homes.
That is a lot to land in one season on a site that spent most of the last decade as an empty racetrack. Whether it ends up functioning the way Kennedy described, as an actual gathering point rather than a well-organized strip of national tenants, will depend on what happens after the ribbon cuttings, once the ordinary rhythm of grocery runs and bank errands sets in. For now, the fair way to describe it is this: Scarborough spent twenty years agreeing on what its downtown should look like, and then built almost all of it in about a season.
If you are watching this unfold and wondering what it might mean for your own plans in Scarborough, whether that is timing a move around the new town center or just understanding how a project like this tends to shift a neighborhood's day to day, Mary Libby Living Real Estate has been tracking Southern Maine's coastal towns for over twenty years. Schedule a free consultation and we will walk through what The Downs, and everything else changing in town this fall, actually means for you.
