Homes for Sale in Oshawa

The 401 splits the city into a compact south and a much larger north. South of the highway, Lakeview runs down to the beach and the harbour, with Vanier and Central just above it and the port and Second Marsh to the east. Downtown is the Four Corners of King Street and Simcoe Street, laid out in 1822 when Simcoe was cut as a colonization road; the Central community wraps around it, O'Neill holds the older streets east of Simcoe near the hospital, and McLaughlin to the west takes in Parkwood Estate and the Oshawa Centre. East of Ritson Road are Donevan and Eastdale, the post-war grid of bungalows and schools. Between Rossland Road and Taunton Road sit Centennial, Samac and Pinecrest, mostly 1970s to 1990s subdivisions. North of Taunton the city is new: Northglen, the Taunton community, Kedron and Windfields, the last built on the former Windfields Farm where Northern Dancer was foaled, beside the campus. Beyond that, Columbus, Raglan and Rural Oshawa are hamlets and farms reaching toward the moraine.

Oshawa GO Station at 915 Bloor Street West is 50.5 kilometres from Union by rail and the current end of the line; the rebuilt station opened on November 24, 2017 with 2,260 parking spaces, and VIA's corridor trains stop there too. Weekday trains have run at 15-minute intervals since the September 2021 timetable, with half-hourly service on weekends. The Bowmanville extension will add almost 20 kilometres of track along the CPKC corridor and four stations, Thornton's Corners East, Ritson Road, Courtice and Bowmanville; construction reportedly started in January 2026. Durham Region Transit's PULSE 900 follows King Street and Highway 2 west from downtown to the University of Toronto Scarborough, PULSE 901 runs Simcoe Street from Lakeview Park to Windfields by way of the campus, and 915 and 916 run Taunton and Rossland to Harmony Road. Highway 401 opened through the city in 1947 with exits at Stevenson, Park, Simcoe, Ritson and Harmony, Highway 407 East reached Harmony Road on June 20, 2016 and Highways 35 and 115 on December 9, 2019, and the 412 and 418 connectors lost their tolls on April 5, 2022.

Oshawa is Durham's college town. Ontario Tech University opened in 2003 and shares its north campus at 2000 Simcoe Street North with Durham College, which has taught there since 1967; the university counted 11,050 students in 2022 and runs the five-storey climatic wind tunnel at its Automotive Centre of Excellence. Trent University Durham GTA moved into its current Oshawa campus in 2010. Together the three schools bring roughly 22,000 full-time students, which shapes the rental market around Simcoe Street North. Lakeridge Health Oshawa is the region's largest hospital, with a full emergency department and the R.S. McLaughlin Durham Regional Cancer Centre on site. For families, public schools belong to the Durham District School Board, whose head office is in Whitby, while Catholic schools answer to Durham Catholic District School Board, based at 650 Rossland Road West in Oshawa; French-language options come from Viamonde (public) and MonAvenir (Catholic). Attendance areas are drawn by each board and can differ from one side of a street to the other, so verify the school for the exact address.

Lakeview Park at the foot of Simcoe Street South has the beach, the pier and the Oshawa Museum's historic houses, and it is the west end of a lakefront that includes the Port of Oshawa, run by the Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority since 2019, and then Second Marsh, a 137-hectare coastal wetland in the southeast corner that joins McLaughlin Bay Wildlife Reserve and Darlington Provincial Park into nearly 400 hectares of public shoreline. Inland, the city counts almost 410 hectares of parkland and more than 27 kilometres of paved trail, plus Parkwood Estate, the 55-room McLaughlin mansion and National Historic Site. Downtown is a designated Urban Growth Centre with the Tribute Communities Centre at 99 Athol Street East, the Generals' arena since November 2006, the Regent Theatre, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the Canadian Automotive Museum. Oshawa Centre at King Street and Stevenson Road opened in 1956, finished a 230 million dollar expansion on September 29, 2016 and is the largest mall in Ontario east of Toronto. Big-box plazas along Taunton Road and Harmony Road serve the north end.