Vol. I, No. 41 · San Francisco — Wednesday, September 23, 2026 · Price: back to par, no interest

BY HAZEL WONG, NUMBERS DESK

Six places to eat or drink make up the city’s own guide to Treasure Island: Aracely Cafe, Mersea, Goldbar Distillery, Island Cove Market, Mateo’s Hot Dogs and Treasure Island Wines. The last is an urban winery poured inside a former Navy building. Between April 2025 and March 2026, the island’s businesses generated $81,501.86 in local sales tax, according to the state’s own quarterly count. That is tax collected, not goods sold: San Francisco’s cut of what the island’s registers rang up. Eleven years earlier, across the four quarters of 2015, the total was $81,478.63.

Between those two points, the same figures show the trailing-year total more than tripling. It peaked at $289,235 in the four quarters ending September 2023, then fell 71.8 percent back to almost exactly where it started. San Francisco approved the plan to redevelop Treasure Island on May 2, 2011, four years before this file even begins. The island’s development authority is still adding to it. Bay FC, a National Women’s Soccer League team based in the Bay Area, announced plans for a permanent training facility there in September 2024, and Cityside Park now hosts a weekly food-truck gathering. The tax register at the island’s own shops is no bigger today than before any of that construction began. Whether the two facts are connected, the data cannot say; it can only say both are true.

Quarter by quarter, the shape is a full arc. The total climbed through the late 2010s and dipped in the pandemic’s first two quarters. Then it climbed harder: by the third quarter of 2023 the island’s businesses generated $83,707.64 in a single quarter, the highest ever recorded and more than triple any quarter of 2015. Two quarters later the climb ended. By the first quarter of 2026 the quarterly figure was $15,569.79, close to where the file opens.

The file itself explains why one number can swing so hard. California shields any area with four or fewer taxpaying businesses, or where a single business pays 80 percent or more of the total, by folding it into a neighbor instead of publishing it separately. That threshold appears to have been crossed once: the second quarter of 2024 is the only quarter since 2015 with no reported figure for Treasure Island at all. A total this size can rise or fall on one restaurant’s receipts.

The most recent four quarters show a turn upward. The quarter ending in March ran 21.5 percent ahead of the same quarter a year earlier, $15,569.79 against $12,810.30, the first year-over-year gain in the file since the crash began. Confidence is high on every figure here: the state’s own count was queried live tonight and checked twice against the underlying quarterly file. The data cannot say why the total is climbing back, or whether it will keep going. It can only say that eleven years and one redevelopment later, the register at Treasure Island’s own six shops is back to where it started.