At the one grocery store on Treasure Island — a family-run place near the middle of the island that regulars describe as surprisingly well-stocked with cheap international staples — a person can learn most of what there is to know about daily life out here. There are no gas stations. There is no hospital. The SF Public Library sends a bus once a week. The ferry terminal sits at the island's edge, and beyond that, the Bay Bridge hums with traffic that is almost entirely passing through.

People do live here. That bears saying plainly, because the island has a reputation as a venue destination — Gold Bar, the big field events, the weekend raves — rather than as a place where someone wakes up, makes coffee, and figures out what's for dinner. "People lived there before the apartments too," one longtime observer noted online, a useful corrective to the shiny-brochure framing of the newer luxury units, which sit in close proximity to lower-income housing and veteran residences.

The luxury branding is doing a lot of work for a place with genuine infrastructure gaps. One resident who kept a warehouse space described the texture of it plainly: one grocery store, a handful of restaurants and bars, not much else. A woman whose friend lives in one of the newer buildings gets most of her groceries from the Trader Joe's by Powell Station, bringing them back across the bridge by car. The island rewards car ownership and punishes its absence. Dogs, apparently, go wherever they want.

What's legible from outside is the gap between the marketing — "live on Treasure Island," the ads say, with their skyline-view photography — and the actual civic infrastructure of the place: no charging stations, no urgent care, a library that visits rather than stays. The people who live there are navigating that gap on their own terms, building a neighborhood routine around a single grocery store and a weekly bookmobile.

Someone walking out to TI tomorrow, past the concert crowds and the parking lot, would find a few hundred residents doing ordinary things in an unordinary place, in buildings that went up before the bus routes did.