Community housing project coming to Grandview Children’s Centre site in Oshawa

Residents of Oshawa and Courtice will get a look next week at a proposed six-storey, 56-unit community housing project on the grounds of the former Grandview Children’s Centre, with plans also including a 29,000 sq. ft. building that will be used for a new childcare centre.

Housing Durham is hosting a drop-in open house to share updates about the 600 Townline Road community housing development project on Monday, June 15.

Construction the project is expected to begin next year.

Durham Region purchased the former Grandview Children’s Centre, a four-acre property at the northwest corner of Townline Road and Bloor Street, in March 2025, nine years after the facility announced it was putting its home on the market and five months after the brand-new Grandview Kids Jerry Coughlan Building opened its doors in Ajax.

No price was disclosed.

The new Grandview Kids Jerry Coughlan Building opened in November 2024 to serve 6,000 children and youth with physical, communication and developmental needs.

Grandview Kids has been Durham Region’s only non-profit children’s treatment centre since its founding in 1953 and at the Townline location since 1983, focusing on specialized treatment and outpatient care for children with developmental challenges.

The new facility had been in the works since 2021.

The facility in the early years

First opened in 1953 in Rotary Hall as the ‘Oshawa and District Cerebral Palsy Parents Council,’ the original facility offered local pediatric medical services so parents would not have to venture to Toronto for specialized health care. In late 1954, the council would move into its first permanent home within Simcoe Hall in Oshawa and begin operating a children’s school.

The facility was renamed ‘Simcoe Hall Crippled Children’s School and Treatment Centre’ later that decade, a term that at the time referred to individuals with disabilities, though now is considered highly inappropriate and no longer used. The name stuck, however, until the 1980s when it became known as the Campbell Children’s School.

Oshawa General/Boston Bruin star Bobby Orr  at the Grandview Children’s Centre

The school moved several more times until land was purchased near Harmony Road and Townline Road in the city’s southeast for $300,000 and a new building was erected in 1983. The name of the centre changed to Grandview Rehabilitation and Treatment Centre of Durham Region two years later.

In 1986, the first satellite locations opened in Port Perry and Pickering, with additional satellite locations in Oshawa, Whitby and Ajax opening throughout the 80s, 90s and 2000s.

The building on Townline Road was originally designed to serve 400 children. At the time of its closing, it served more than 5,600 kids with varying disabilities and has 2,600 more on a wait list. By 2031, the new facility expects to provide service to more than 10,000 children a year.

The new Grandview Kids Jerry Coughlan Building in Ajax