Living in Scarborough, Maine Year-Round: A Big, Growing Town Behind Higgins Beach

A Large, Fast-Growing Town by Maine Standards

Scarborough counted 22,135 residents at the 2020 Census, making it the sixth most populous municipality in Maine. The Census Bureau's July 1, 2025 vintage population estimate puts the town at 24,547 residents -- roughly 11% growth in five years, a pace that puts Scarborough among the faster-growing towns in the state. That is a meaningfully different growth story than a town whose population depends on a summer tourist season: it reads as ongoing, real demand for year-round housing, not a seasonal swing.

Part of what makes that growth possible is sheer size. Scarborough's land area runs 47.61 to 47.75 square miles depending on the source (Wikipedia and Census QuickFacts differ slightly), with a total area of 70.63 square miles once Gulf of Maine and marsh water is included. That makes Scarborough a genuinely large town by New England standards -- more than double the land area of many of its coastal neighbors -- and it means daily life here is not defined by any single beach village. Higgins Beach and Prouts Neck are two named points on a much bigger map that also includes Pine Point, Oak Hill, North Scarborough, Dunstan, Blue Point, Eight Corners, Pleasant Hill, and West Scarborough.

An Economy Bigger Than the Beach: Hannaford and The Downs

Scarborough is the headquarters town of Hannaford supermarkets, a real, verifiable, non-tourism economic anchor that sets it apart from towns whose year-round economy runs mostly on restaurants, rentals, and retail tied to a summer season. That corporate presence is one part of a broader diversification story that is still unfolding: the redevelopment of Scarborough Downs.

Scarborough Downs ran live harness and thoroughbred racing for 70 years before its final races in late November 2020. The shuttered 525-acre track is now being rebuilt by developer M&R Holdings into "The Downs," described as Maine's first-ever from-scratch new-build town center. Groundbreaking on October 25, 2023 was attended by then-Governor Janet Mills. At full buildout, the project is projected to add roughly $615 million in new assessed value, about $10 million in annual tax revenue, up to 3,000 new jobs, and close to 2 million square feet of commercial space. Housing at the site has been reported at anywhere from roughly 500 to 622 units built or approved as of 2025 -- the number keeps moving as construction continues, so treat it as a snapshot of an active build-out rather than a fixed figure. What is already open and operating: Maine's first Costco, whose regional shopping-traffic impact a November 2025 Portland Press Herald study specifically examined, and Idexx offices within a planned "Innovation District" of light-industrial space. A Market Basket supermarket was announced in November 2024, Allagash Brewing has committed to a location built around a planned central green, and the first commercial buildings -- three buildings totaling roughly 144,000 square feet -- won planning approval as the project moved into its retail phase in 2025. This is, in plain terms, a real second economic engine for the town beyond tourism and beyond Hannaford, still being built as of this writing.

Taxes and the Real Cost of Living Here

Maine levies a state personal income tax, so any full accounting of the cost of living in Scarborough year-round has to include that exposure alongside the property tax rate, not just the property tax rate on its own. On that property tax rate, Scarborough compares well: the FY2025-26 mil rate is $11.33 per $1,000 of assessed value, effective August 20, 2025. A comparison table circulated by the Scarborough Economic Development Corporation for the prior fiscal year put Scarborough at $10.93 against Cape Elizabeth's $11.00, Waterboro's $11.05, South Portland's $13.20, Freeport's $13.35, Saco's $14.05, Westbrook's $14.75, Gorham's $14.70, Portland's $15.01, Bath's $16.50, and Bangor's $18.55. Either way you read the two numbers, Scarborough sits at or near the bottom of that list -- one of the lowest property tax rates of any coastal or greater-Portland-area town, and meaningfully below Portland, South Portland, and Saco specifically.

On home values: Zillow's typical home value (ZHVI) for Scarborough stood at $705,594 as of data through June 30, 2026, down 1.1% over the past year, with homes reportedly going to pending in around 8 days. Movoto's tracking of Redfin-style MLS data put the median sale price at $799,000 as of June 2026, with 110 homes sold that month, up from 93 the year before, and average days on market down to 30 from 33 -- a market turning over faster and with rising sales volume even as the typical price ticked down slightly. For a longer-run baseline, the Census Bureau's 2020-2024 five-year American Community Survey estimate puts the median value of owner-occupied housing units at $551,900; because that figure blends five years of data, it should be read as a trailing historical comparison point rather than a current-market number.

One Town, Several Very Different Ways to Live

Because Scarborough is so large, "living in Scarborough" means genuinely different things depending on where in town you are. Prouts Neck, the peninsula where Winslow Homer built his studio, is almost completely built out today as a private, seasonal summer colony -- gated and private roads, its own police patrol, century-old cottages, and a Prouts Neck Country Club (established 1907) with golf and tennis restricted to residents. It is Scarborough's most exclusive, least year-round-oriented corner. Pine Point, at the town's southern end, is the opposite kind of place: a working fishing village with an active Fisherman's Co-Op, a town dock, and a commercial pier completed in 2011 specifically to support Scarborough's fishing fleet -- a residential, family, working-harbor character, not a resort scene. Higgins Beach is smaller still, a named oceanfront village with its own active local calendar run by the Higgins Beach Association (summer concerts, craft shows, a July 4th celebration, weekly summer beach yoga).

None of those three places is where most of Scarborough's year-round population actually lives, though. That is largely in the town's bigger, more suburban and inland villages -- Oak Hill and North Scarborough chief among them -- along with Dunstan, Blue Point, Eight Corners, Pleasant Hill, and West Scarborough. Anyone evaluating Scarborough as a year-round home should think about which of these very different areas they mean: a gated seasonal colony, a working beach village, or an inland suburban neighborhood are three different products inside one town line.

The Marsh, the Eastern Trail, and Being Seven Miles From Portland

Year-round life in Scarborough comes with practical and recreational amenities that have nothing to do with the beach villages. Scarborough Marsh, commonly cited at roughly 3,100 to 3,200 acres, is the largest contiguous salt marsh in Maine -- a state-owned wildlife management area drained by four rivers (the Scarborough, Nonesuch, Libby, and Spurwink) and home to the Maine Audubon Scarborough Marsh Nature Center at 92 Pine Point Road, which offers naturalist-guided canoe tours and canoe/kayak rentals running $25 to $55 depending on duration. The Eastern Trail, a multi-use path for biking, walking, and cross-country skiing, runs through and along the marsh, giving residents a genuine outdoor-recreation amenity that has nothing to do with sand or surf.

Scarborough also sits on Route 1 and I-95 roughly seven miles south of Portland, close enough for a genuine commuting and cultural relationship with Maine's largest city. That proximity is part of what makes the Winslow Homer Studio at Prouts Neck workable as a real amenity for residents and visitors alike: the studio, a National Historic Landmark since 1965, was acquired and restored by the Portland Museum of Art in 2006 and reopened for guided tours in 2012. Tours depart from and return to the PMA's downtown Portland location, priced at $75 for non-members, $40 for members, and $25 for students 22 and over -- visitors are explicitly told not to drive to the studio itself. Scarborough Beach State Park, a separate public beach on Black Point Road known particularly for surfing, rounds out the town's non-village public recreation.

Flood Risk Is Real, and It Is Concentrated in the Coastal Villages

An honest look at year-round life in Scarborough has to include its coastal flood risk, which is real and currently the subject of active town planning. A powerful storm surge on January 13, 2024 caused documented damage at Higgins Beach: homes closest to the water had rocks driven through windows by wave action, sections of the beachfront road broke up, debris covered Bayview Avenue and required bulldozer cleanup, and at least one home saw significant basement flooding -- residents and the fire chief at the time called it historic.

The town commissioned a formal coastal vulnerability assessment in response, with recommendations presented on September 9, 2025. The findings, as reported by WGME: 38 roads in Scarborough currently face coastal flooding risk, and without intervention that number could rise to 100 roads within 25 years as sea levels rise. Recommended measures include deploying temporary flood barriers, establishing evacuation routes, and elevating Pine Point Road. The town's sustainability manager, Jami Fitch, noted a real regulatory constraint on the response: because Pine Point and Higgins Beach sit within state-mapped sand dune systems, Maine's dune rules sharply limit what hard infrastructure -- seawalls, for instance -- the town can actually build there. This risk is concentrated in the coastal villages rather than spread evenly across the town; it is a genuine factor to weigh for anyone considering a home in Higgins Beach or Pine Point specifically, distinct from the flood exposure (or lack of it) in Scarborough's larger inland neighborhoods.

Putting It Together: A Big Town Still Being Built, Not Just a Beach

Scarborough's year-round story is fundamentally different from a small, tourism-dependent beach town. It is one of Maine's larger and faster-growing municipalities, home to a real non-tourism employer in Hannaford, and currently in the middle of building a second economic center from scratch at The Downs, with Costco already open, Idexx offices, and a Market Basket and Allagash Brewing still to come. Its property tax rate is genuinely competitive with -- and often lower than -- its coastal and greater-Portland neighbors, even though Maine's state income tax is part of the real picture. Its identity is not one thing: Prouts Neck's private summer colony, Pine Point's working fishing village, Higgins Beach's small community, and the larger suburban expanse of Oak Hill and North Scarborough where most residents actually live are four genuinely different ways to experience the same town. The Scarborough Marsh, the Eastern Trail, and a seven-mile drive to Portland's museums and job market round out a set of year-round amenities that have nothing to do with a beach umbrella. And the town's real coastal flood risk, concentrated in Higgins Beach and Pine Point and now the subject of an active town planning process, is a genuine tradeoff to weigh rather than an inconvenient footnote -- particularly for anyone looking specifically at the coastal villages rather than the larger inland town around them.