ALAMEDA — The Bay Area’s booming economy is reshaping residential communities throughout the region, but perhaps none so much as this cozy island town that managed to resist change for years.

Drawn by Alameda’s good schools, safe streets and trendy shops and restaurants, tech workers and others benefiting from the region’s growth have helped drive the city’s housing costs up 30 percent in two years, with the typical home fetching more than $766,000 now, according to research firm CoreLogic DataQuick.

But fears of overdevelopment, traffic jams and loss of the town’s charm have sparked a backlash at the polls. Voters, in a close race, dumped a pro-growth mayor in November for one firmly in the anti-residential development camp.

And the debate here reflects one the entire region struggles with: How much growth is too much?

In Palo Alto, for example, growth, parking and traffic were issues that helped several candidates in the November elections favoring a moderate approach to development. In Cupertino, a heated council meeting Nov. 10 on the city’s housing and development plans ran until 5 a.m., with deputies on hand to manage an overflow crowd of several hundred voicing concerns over growth, traffic congestion, impacts on schools and parking.

“Alameda is not alone,” said Jennifer Ott, the chief operating officer for a controversial development on the abandoned Alameda Naval Air Station the city now controls. “The whole region is facing major traffic congestion issues that are going to have to get addressed.”

But Alameda has just about everything a young family fleeing San Francisco’s high prices needs. It’s a short commute to tech jobs in that city, as well as Emeryville and Oakland. Alameda High is ranked in the top third of high schools in the state, and the city’s relative isolation has created a strong sense of community. And even a brief visit is enough to see its many charms, especially along the East End, which is dotted with high-end coffee shops, organic markets, a restored art deco movie theater and trendy restaurants.

“For folks who are moving out of the city, Alameda is really attractive,” said Michele Ellson, who moved from San Francisco’s Ingleside district to Alameda nine years ago and who blogs about civic affairs.

But because it’s an island with only four bridges, a tube and ferry to get 75,000 residents onto the mainland and back, it can handle only so much population growth and, apparently, only so much change.

The city is already sprinkled with new commercial and residential developments, the result of a yearslong push by the city that has given residents more places to shop without leaving the island — but also sparked fears that it will become a crowded Anytown, USA.

Mike Cooper, a retired local high school principal who operates the 1400 Bar & Grill, complains that some of the new development “looks like the Vacaville outlet mall,” but he likes the young families that are moving in. “The last 10 years or so, new people are coming in that are higher-educated, and they’re bringing a lot of positivity to the island,” Cooper said.

Alameda Landing, next to the estuary, has a Target and will soon have a new Safeway and 278 new townhomes, condos and apartments. The Target has ruffled some feathers among longtime residents who prize the city’s character, although others appreciate it.

Alameda is “a pretty unique place and has a chance to maintain that uniqueness if development is done right,” said Lance Winters, whose St. George Spirits distillery is in a cluster of beverage companies on the old air station nicknamed Spirits Alley. “But what I’ve seen going on is a whole lot of stuff that works toward homogenizing Alameda,” he said. “If you were blindfolded, you could be in any city across the county. You have a Target, a Michaels, a Safeway, a Starbucks.”

Andrea Warren, who works for Pixar, said, “I can’t deny that I go to that Target frequently enough.” Warren and her husband, Lars Damerow, who also works for Pixar, and their kindergartner daughter, recently moved up to a bigger home.

“I get what people are worried about,” she said. “I certainly appreciate having the great restaurants that are coming in, and there are a lot of great stores that aren’t chain stores, too. You see a mixture of both. It creates more options for people.”

Warren says she keeps running into people at Pixar who are moving to Alameda, reflecting the popularity of the island for the area’s tech workers with young families.

The split in feelings even divides husbands and wives. “I was on wrong side of that issue in my own house,” said newly elected slow-growth Councilman Frank Matarrese. “My wife wanted Target here.”

The biggest project, one that became a key issue in the council election, is a $2 billion mixed-use development — including a ferry terminal and sports complex — on the old Alameda Naval Air Station at Alameda Point, on the island’s western end. The city is counting on a planned 1,425 units of housing to defray the $600 million estimated cost of upgrading a decrepit infrastructure left by the Navy nearly two decades ago. Without those repairs, the city’s unlikely to draw enough commercial tenants to fill a planned 5.5 million square feet of commercial space. “It was thrown together by the Navy to fight a war effort,” said outgoing Mayor Marie Gilmore. “It was not meant to last all of these years, and the city of Alameda owns it.”

But opposition to the project helped tip the Nov. 4 mayoral and council election toward slow-growther Trish Spencer, a school board member, by a narrow 120 votes out of 20,865 cast.

Spencer favors parks and job-creating businesses at the point. “There is a whole group of homes already started” in Alameda, she said. “This is why many of us think we need to take a break from building residential.”

Traffic was the issue for Simon Kim, a resident and civil engineer who spoke against moving ahead with the Alameda Point development at a recent City Council meeting. “We have seen the traffic problem deteriorating dramatically,” Kim told the council. “We are considering moving out of the place.”

Kim said he voted for the slow-growth candidates in November. “I was a little frustrated with the City Council,” he said. “They are very much pro-development. Every available parcel is converting into one of these deals, with the biggest one at Alameda Point. It concerns a lot of us.”

City Manager John Russo says the election merely showed that the community is divided about growth. “A lot of the fear about rampant growth that caused a lot of people to vote the way they did is nonsense, a fantasy narrative that was never on the table,” he said.

On Nov. 18, at a sometimes-acrimonious public hearing, the City Council — which doesn’t transition until Tuesday — voted on whether to proceed with negotiations with developer Alameda Point Partners for the first, 800-home phase of the Alameda Point development.

Mayor-elect Spencer urged the council to wait until new council members are seated. She warned that when the council votes on a contract with the developer in May, it might not garner the four votes necessary to proceed.

“It’s time you let go and you let the new members determine the future,” Spencer said.

The motion to proceed was adopted unanimously, but the debate is likely to continue.

Contact Pete Carey at 408-920-5419. Follow him at Twitter.com/petecarey.