Vol. I, No. 26 · San Francisco — Wednesday, August 19, 2026 · Price: recorded, not appraised
BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK
490 Avenue of the Palms, a six-story building of 148 apartments on Treasure Island, opened on July 17, 2026, one of several new communities on the reshaped former naval base that its developer now calls “nearly leased up.”
Behind that opening sits a much bigger number, recorded in the city’s own map of every taxable lot in town. San Francisco’s parcel file grew by 1,534 lines between January 1 and August 6, 2026. Of those, 1,318, or 86 percent, sit on Treasure Island alone. Most of those new lines are legal lots, not finished buildings; only one new building has actually opened on the island this year. A single filing recorded August 6 cut 1,194 new lots into the island at once, more than six times everything the file had added there in the previous decade combined. Most of the built city rarely produces a new parcel line at all; its lots were platted decades or a century ago and just change hands. For most of the past decade, Treasure Island was a rounding error in that count. This year it is most of the count.
The gap itself is on the record, and so is why the island had so little parcel history to begin with. Treasure Island is not really an island; the Army Corps of Engineers built it between 1936 and 1939 from 29 million cubic yards of sand and mud dredged from the bay and the Sacramento River delta, to host the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939–40. The Navy took it over in 1941 and held it for half a century before Naval Station Treasure Island closed September 30, 1997, under a national round of base closures; the site sat largely idle through the 2000s while the city negotiated to take it over. The Board of Supervisors approved the redevelopment plan 11 to 0 on June 7, 2011, and construction of roads, seawalls and utilities followed soon after; the parcel file shows the first real activity in 2016 (2 new lots), infrastructure waves in 2018 and 2019 (67 and 64), then five quiet years adding a combined 62 lots between 2020 and 2025. Then came 2026.
The developer’s own account of the summer matches the shape of the map. “490 Avenue of the Palms debuts as our other new communities are nearly leased up, and as new parks, roads, and open space are completed across the island,” Chris Meany, co-CEO of Treasure Island Community Development, said when the building opened. The finished plan calls for 8,000 homes on the island, including 2,700 permanently affordable units; at full build-out it would be one of the largest new neighborhoods San Francisco has added in a century, on land the Navy handed back three decades ago.
The August 6 filing does not mean 1,194 new homes now exist. A parcel, in the assessor’s system, marks a lot that has been legally defined; it says nothing about whether anything has been built on it, and most of the fresh Treasure Island lots carry no address yet. Only one new building opened this summer, the 148-unit 490 Avenue of the Palms; the developer says its predecessors on the island are close to full occupancy. What the filing shows with more confidence is a change in the island’s legal shape: after a decade of small, sporadic map edits while roads and parks were finished, the city has now defined, on paper, most of the individual home sites the master plan promises, well ahead of the buildings that will eventually fill them.
San Francisco’s coyotes, absent 77 years, are now sighted 373 times a year
Research-grade sightings on the citizen-science app iNaturalist have run in the hundreds every year since 2016, a rate that outpaces the city’s own boom in nature-watching.
BY NOODLES, WESTERN PARKS BUREAU
The last confirmed coyote in San Francisco before the modern era was seen in Golden Gate Park in 1925. For the next seventy-seven years, as far as the public record shows, there were none.
That changed in 2002, when coyotes began turning up in the Presidio. A coyote captured there in May 2003 and released with a radio collar carried DNA that traced, with 97.5 percent confidence, to a population north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Today the animal is common enough that citizen scientists log it by the hundreds every year: San Francisco County’s “research-grade” record on iNaturalist, the app’s own label for a sighting confirmed by community consensus, runs from a single 2003 sighting to 373 in 2025, out of 3,458 logged since the return began. A species erased from the city for most of the twentieth century has spent the twenty-first quietly becoming a fixture of it, in parks, backyards and traffic medians across every district.
The raw count alone could just mean more people are pointing more phones at more animals; the whole app grew explosively over the same years. It is not only that. Coyote sightings as a share of every research-grade observation logged in San Francisco, of any species, rose from under 5 per 1,000 in 2013 to a peak near 15 per 1,000 in 2022, then dropped, rebounded, and settled near 9 per 1,000 in 2025. Discounted against the city’s own boom in nature-watching, coyotes are reported nearly twice as often today as they were in 2013, even after coming off the 2022 high.
What the data cannot say is why the rate eased after 2022. It could mean the population leveled off as the city’s habitat filled in and territories became established; it could mean residents and the animals both grew more used to each other and stopped reporting routine encounters; or it could mean a run of unusual curiosity, stacked on the app’s own pandemic-era growth spurt, has simply worn off. The count that would settle it, an actual population survey rather than a tally of who bothered to post, does not exist for San Francisco.
A century after the last one vanished, San Francisco’s coyotes are no longer news in the sense of being new; by the numbers, the animal that took twenty years to become common shows no sign of becoming rare again.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. sfyimby.com, “Phase One of Treasure Island Redevelopment Opens,” July 2026: 490 Avenue of the Palms, 148 units, opened July 17, 2026; Chris Meany quote; plan totals of 8,000 homes / 2,700 affordable. 2. DataSF, Parcels — active and retired (acdm-wktn), queried August 19, 2026: 1,513 active Treasure Island parcels, 1,318 added in 2026 (124 on February 11 + 1,194 on August 6), against 1,534 added citywide in 2026 and 195 added on the island 2016–2025. 3. Island construction, 1936–1939 (Army Corps of Engineers, 29 million cubic yards of fill) and the 1939–40 Golden Gate International Exposition: California Office of Historic Preservation listing; treasureislandmuseum.org. 4. Navy Base Realignment and Closure program office: Naval Station Treasure Island closed September 30, 1997. 5. Board of Supervisors approval, June 7, 2011 (SF Planning; public record), cross-checked against the DataSF year-by-year parcel counts in receipts.json. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
2. Presidio.gov, “Coyotes in the Presidio”; KQED, “Coyotes in San Francisco’s Presidio Are Here to Stay”: last confirmed 20th-century San Francisco coyote seen in Golden Gate Park, 1925. 2. Same sources: coyotes began recolonizing the Presidio in 2002. 3. U.S. Geological Survey, “San Francisco’s Golden Gate: A bridge between historically distinct coyote populations?” (pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70190592): May 2003 radio-collar and DNA study. 4. iNaturalist API, San Francisco County (place_id 854), Canis latrans, research grade, queried August 19, 2026: 3,458 total observations 2003–2026, 373 in 2025; rate per 1,000 computed against all-taxa research-grade observations in the same county and years. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
The Frisconian · Published from forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality · @deaconsanti