The City of Toronto on Thursday marked a construction milestone for a new mid-rise rental building in southwest Scarborough that will deliver eighty affordable homes once it comes online in mid-2028. The development, located at the corner of Lawrence Avenue East and Markham Road, is being financed through a combination of City of Toronto open-door incentives, federal Apartment Construction Loan Program credit and the Province of Ontario's Building Faster Fund top-up.
All eighty homes will be rented at below-market levels, with rents set at sixty per cent of average market rent or below for a minimum thirty-year affordability period. Twenty units will be permanently affordable. The project includes thirteen three-bedroom homes designed for families, and twelve units will be fully accessible to current Toronto Accessibility Design Standards. A Toronto Public Library satellite branch is incorporated into the ground floor.
The announcement is the eleventh project to start construction this year under what Mayor Olivia Chow has labelled the "accelerated HousingTO 2026-2030 pipeline," a slate of seventy-three projects which she relaunched in March after first-year delivery numbers fell behind the prior council's targets. Chow, who confirmed earlier this week she will seek a second term in the October 2026 mayoral election, has put a "homes for all" frame at the centre of her re-election pitch.
Chow said in a brief statement that "Toronto is building, and Toronto is building affordable homes" and that her administration would deliver more than seven thousand affordable starts in calendar 2026. The city is currently tracking toward roughly five thousand five hundred starts based on permits pulled through mid-May, according to Toronto Building data published quarterly.
Scarborough Centre councillor Michael Thompson, who attended Thursday's event, said the project was "exactly the kind of family-sized affordable housing Scarborough has needed for years" and called on the federal Carney government to extend the Apartment Construction Loan Program beyond its current 2028 expiry. Federal housing minister Gregor Robertson, on a separate visit to Vancouver this week, said he was "actively considering" such an extension.
The project's general contractor is Tridel Builders, with construction expected to take twenty-six months. Toronto Community Housing Corporation will own and operate the building. Chow's office said two further affordable-housing groundbreakings are scheduled in Etobicoke and East York for the coming three weeks, bringing the year-to-date count to thirteen out of the seventy-three targeted projects in the HousingTO pipeline.