Toronto is about to get an entirely new skyline where you'd least expect

The Golden Mile area of Scarborough may indeed have a gilded future of glittering towers.

An onslaught of development is promising a from-scratch skyline of new towers in the coming years for this stretch of Eglinton Avenue East, fuelled by new transit investment and shifting retail habits.

The Golden Mile area's plentiful collection of big-box retail outlets with vast swathes of surface parking make perfect canvases for ambitious new master-planned, mixed-use communities. Several of these sweeping plans have been proposed over the past several years, and will form a whole new skyline of tall towers once fully realized.

All of these towers will hug Eglinton Avenue East, giving Scarborough another dense focal point along an important transit corridor. Five new Eglinton Crosstown stations will provide transit connectivity for this linear strip of density, assuming the line actually opens someday.

To better visualize this future, digital marketer and passionate urban development analyst Stephen Velasco — known for his 3D digital models of Toronto's future cityscapes — has created a diagram showing just how tall and dense this new Golden Mile skyline will look a few years down the road.

There are over 32,000 residential units proposed in the Golden Mile and more than 9,000 proposed in the #Scarborough Junction. A look at what's coming:#Toronto #urbanplanning pic.twitter.com/acdkJQ7uTu

— Future Model Toronto (@FutureModelTO) July 18, 2023

Velasco tells blogTO that "there are over 32,000 residential units proposed across more than 75 high-rise and mid-rise towers in the Golden Mile."

He says that while the area "currently exists as a mix of strip malls, big box retailers, industrial buildings, and parking lots," excitement is building over what is "expected to become a large mixed-use community in one of the most dramatic urban transformations in all of Toronto."

The transformation from car-dependant big-box retail to transit-oriented, high-density urban living will indeed be one of the most dramatic land-use shifts in recent Toronto history, and is a sure sign that the inner suburbs are growing up fast.

Velasco says that these new developments will bring upwards of 40,000 new residents to the neighbourhood in the years to come.