SEATTLE — I tend to ignore the usual measurements of what makes a city robust and healthy, the urban bragging points. Along the West Coast, these superlatives roll out with regularity. Seattle, two years ago, was proclaimed the fastest growing city in the United States. San Francisco usually tops the list of most expensive places to live. And Portland, Ore., just posted the highest percentage rise in home prices among major cities.

This is great, for realtors and tax collectors. Hooray — we’re shiny, new and less affordable than most cities of the world! Try the kale smoothie.

I look for something else: Could Kramer still live in my city? Yeah, Kramer, the “Seinfeld” character who never held a real job, but had a fairly cool apartment. His source of income was suspect. His schemes were sitcom-absurd. His ambition was, I don’t know, to publish a coffee-table book about coffee tables.

Every town needs its Kramers. And in Seattle, where I was born and still live, where my grandmother spent her last days in subsidized housing with a view of Puget Sound, I’m afraid we’re losing ours.

Job growth is steroidal. The big urban carnivore is Amazon.com, with its global headquarters now gobbling up enough office space in the formerly funky South Lake Union district to fill almost two skyscrapers the size of the city’s tallest building, the 76-story Columbia Center. Twice that amount is in the pipeline, as Amazon seeks to become the world’s largest retailer. Google just announced grand plans for the same neighborhood. A metro area of 3.5 million is adding 60,000 people a year.

Growth, even the metastatic kind, is usually trumpeted with a lot of rah-rah. The opposite — the sad decline of a Detroit, a Cleveland or a Baltimore — is much worse. So who wouldn’t want the fresh money and talent flowing into the vibrant urban centers of the West Coast? Well, this city. And Portland. And San Francisco as well.

Rising rents threaten to push out the quirky and creative types who make these places eternally young and resilient. You saw the pattern in Brooklyn — that urban tipping point. An average wage earner living in Brooklyn would somehow have to spend 120 percent of his or her monthly income to make rent.

In the Bay Area, there’s a desperate effort to keep the last un-gentrified neighborhoods from being taken over by techies, a quixotic mission. In Portland, where young people go to retire, that Krameresque option is fading. What’s next: homeless hipsters in “Portlandia”? It’s already happening. And here in Seattle, it can seem like Amazon is a large foreign presence growing inside of us — a transplant that has yet to take.

During a laser-vision-clear spring week like we’re having now, a forest of construction cranes blocks views of the snowcapped Olympic Mountains to the west of the clangorous technopolis. The views, at least, used to be free. A downtown neighborhood that once featured a bar with a 6 a.m. happy hour and a refuge for sailors called the Catholic Seamen’s Club is now better known for the gleaming new building that was home to the overcompensated creep in “Fifty Shades of Grey.”For all of that, bald eagles nest in city parks and boys and girls in boats still glide over Lake Washington. On Puget Sound’s shore, a working waterfront remains, with foghorns and a briny grittiness. Nature has not been entirely neutered.

Seattle used to want to be like San Francisco, albeit with six months of steady rain. No more. What’s become of San Francisco — the nation’s most childless city, traffic that is frozen all hours of the day, a surfeit of sketchy and unprosecuted property crimes, and 4,300 people on the street — is nothing to duplicate. Talented young people are living in tents, garages, vans, even a wooden box, home for someone paying $400 a month for said confinement. Kramer would need a trust fund.

I’m not against the brogrammers walking the canyons of the Amazon compound in Seattle. I welcome the newcomers who challenge the civic xenophobia of the natives. I’m proud to share a hometown with a philanthropy attempting to give away more money than any private entity has ever tried to do. Two of the great stories of modern America — Amazon and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — define the Seattle of 2016.

But I also wonder if there is any way to slow or mitigate the pace of change, to ensure that the city’s soul is not swept out by the new. How do you contain the excesses of entrepreneurial capitalism and nurture the things you like — original music, food, businesses and literature, affordable homes for cops and Kramers? Unfettered growth just produces more inequality. So does taxing the middle class to death.

A great city has to give space for people to fail, for its Kramers. Other places, much older than the urban adolescents on the West Coast, have grappled with these same problems, with limited success. But that’s one of the things that’s still so invigorating about the West — the past has never been seen as a barrier to inventing a better future.

<TIMOTHY EGAN>