Drive down Payne Road toward Haigis Parkway this month and the change since spring is hard to miss. There's a fresh NBT Bank sign catching the afternoon sun. Steel framing rises where an 80,000-square-foot Market Basket is taking shape. A crew is finishing exterior work on a four-story building with apartments stacked over storefronts. From the road, it reads like a downtown that's already arrived.
It isn't, not quite. The businesses filling in at The Downs are running well ahead of the actual civic heart of the project, the town green and the cobblestone street meant to host farmers markets and outdoor concerts. That piece is still a rendering. What's opening this year mostly solves errands, not gathering.
What's Already Running
Some of this has been operating long enough that it barely registers as "new" anymore. Costco opened on the north side of the property off Payne Road in 2023 and, according to a study on the store's local economic effect, now draws nearly 2 million shoppers a year to businesses nearby. IDEXX has been a fixture on the site for years, one of more than 50 businesses the developer counts as tenants across the 577-acre former racetrack.
The most recent addition with any real runway is the Allagash Bungalow, which opened August 2, 2025, at 10 Market Street. It's a 175-seat tasting room built as a second location for the Portland brewery, with a food menu from Bite Into Maine and ice cream from Parlor. The staff runs trivia nights and free tastings, the kind of recurring, low-key programming that gives a new building a reason to have regulars before it has much of a neighborhood around it.
Housing has moved faster than most people realize. As of this summer, the project has produced roughly 700 residential units in total, spanning single-family homes, market-rate apartments, townhouses, subsidized senior apartments, and tiny homes. That range is part of why the Greater Portland Council of Governments has pointed to Scarborough as a statewide leader in housing production.
The Next Wave Lands Before Winter, Mostly
In mid-July, the developer announced three more tenants for the town center: Verizon, NBT Bank, and Maine Community Bank. Verizon is taking a street-level storefront in a new building called The Breakaway, on Scarborough Downs Road, which broke ground in May and will carry 76 one- and two-bedroom apartments on the four floors above. A local artist is expected to paint a mural on the building tracing the 70-year run of harness racing that operated on this land from 1950 until the track's final race in 2020. NBT Bank has leased space at 72 Market Street next to the future Market Basket, and Maine Community Bank is buying commercial condo space at 4 Market Street, near the Allagash tasting room.
More than 240,000 square feet of commercial space is currently under construction in the town center, and as of that July announcement, about 70 percent of it was already leased or purchased. That's a meaningful vacancy signal for anyone watching how fast this fills in versus how fast it gets used.
Market Basket, announced back in November 2024 as the town center's first retail tenant, was originally targeted for a fall 2026 opening, which puts it on the calendar for right about now. Whether it lands exactly on schedule or slides a few weeks either way, it's close. The InterMed surgery center is a slightly different story. The developer's own site still advertises a spring 2026 opening, a date that's already passed. The town's original construction timeline told a more conservative story, with the InterMed building completed by fall 2026, not spring, followed by the buildings around the green and the woonerf in 2027. That gap between the marketing copy and the actual build schedule is worth noticing, because it's the same pattern playing out at a smaller scale: the parts of this project you can lease and staff are moving faster than the parts you have to pour concrete and coordinate a dozen contractors for.
Café Luna is a good example of how far out some of this still is. The café is relocating from its longtime spot on Route 1 into the town center, but the move isn't happening this year. As of the July announcement, it's planned for next spring, which puts it into 2027.
Here's how the pieces line up right now:
| Status | What it is | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Open | Costco | Operating since 2023, off Payne Road |
| Open | Allagash Bungalow | Opened August 2, 2025, at 10 Market Street |
| Under construction, expected late 2026 | Market Basket | 80,000 square feet, 300 jobs, corner of Market Street and Scarborough Downs Road |
| Under construction, timeline uncertain | InterMed surgery center | Marketed for spring 2026, building timeline points to fall |
| Announced July 2026, opening date TBD | Verizon, NBT Bank, Maine Community Bank | Leasing space at 72 and 4 Market Street and in The Breakaway |
| Planned for spring 2027 | Café Luna | Relocating from Route 1 |
| Planned for 2027 | Town green and woonerf street | The project's central public gathering space |
The Green Space Is Still on Paper
The centerpiece of the whole plan is a cobblestone "woonerf," a Dutch term for a shared street where pedestrians, cyclists, and cars move together without curbs separating them. The idea is that it runs along a town green and can be closed off entirely for food trucks, craft fairs, or a concert, the kind of flexible public space that Scarborough, for all its size and tax base, has never actually had. That piece of the project isn't scheduled to arrive until 2027, after the buildings currently under construction are finished.
Not everyone in town is convinced the sequencing will work out as drawn. Susan Hamill, who leads a local taxpayers' group, put it plainly when the project's plans were previewed: "It's a gamble. They're going to have to get everything right." Her concern was less about whether tenants would show up and more about whether a town green designed from scratch, built after the commercial buildings around it are already leased, can actually function as the kind of organic gathering space that older Maine downtowns grew into over a century, not a construction schedule.
That skepticism is worth sitting with, because it points to the actual open question here. Getting a Verizon store, two bank branches, and a supermarket built is a real estate and leasing problem, and this developer has clearly solved that part quickly. Getting people to treat an empty patch of ground next to a supermarket as a place worth showing up to on a Saturday morning is a different kind of problem, and it won't have an answer until there's actually a green there to test it on.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
For Scarborough residents, the practical version of all this is simple. This year, The Downs becomes a genuinely useful place to consolidate errands, a grocery run, a bank stop, a pint at Allagash, without a drive to Route 1 or into Portland. That's a real convenience shift, and it's arriving in stages between now and the end of the year as Market Basket and the newly announced tenants open their doors.
What isn't arriving this year is the part that was supposed to make this feel like an actual downtown rather than a well-organized shopping node. The green space, the woonerf, the outdoor markets and concerts the renderings have promised since this project was announced, that's a 2027 story, and even the building timelines feeding into it have already shown some slippage. If you're the type of resident who's been waiting for Scarborough to finally get a walkable town square out of this, the honest read is that you've got at least one more year of watching buildings go up before there's a square to walk to.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own corner of Scarborough, whether it's how a project like this tends to shift demand in surrounding neighborhoods or what it's worth keeping an eye on as the town center fills in, Alexa Oestreicher and Reed are always glad to talk through it. Contact us anytime.
