Seattlites have always been proud of their image as a kind of last frontier. In the 80's, a strong economy nourished that pride. Boeing, the region's largest employer, with 104,000 workers and an annual payroll of $4 billion, was flourishing; the Seattle-Tacoma port had emerged as a center for Pacific Rim trade; the high-tech industry, dominated by the giant Microsoft and with 350 other software companies, was in a boom phase. While other downtowns withered, Seattle's prospered.

All this good word swelled the region's statistics. The population grew by 18 percent in the last decade (the national figure was only 9); unemployment is now at a 22-year low (3.4 percent). Demand drove the housing market wild: last year the average selling price of a house in Seattle was 40 percent higher than the year before, and it was not unusual for anxious buyers to line up three and four deep and make offers on the stoop.

People liked Seattle for its small-town, big-city mix and lack of pretension. Many came to start families. In a recent poll the most common reply to the question "What Is Your Favorite Place to Unwind After Work?" (asked by the Seattle Weekly) was "Home." Migration to Seattle was so intense in the last few years that it became virtually impossible to rent a U-Haul to the area; trucks and vans were getting stuck here. No one was leaving.

That nothing lasts is nowhere more conspicuous than in the United States. As the 90's dawned, Seattle -- and its booming suburbs and exurbs -- was beginning to pay the price for its good press. That price is easily measured: the rising cost of living is making it harder for the middle class to live within the city limits, and there is an emerging clash between rich and poor. Tolerance, moderation, the small-town virtues that attracted people, are in shorter supply. Seattle is no longer a quaint frontier town but a booming metropolis teetering precariously on the brink of becoming something it did not particularly seek to become: a big urban city, with all the advantages and headaches that accompany that designation.

Must the growth of a city inevitably lead to decay? That seems to be the pattern in this country, in "livable city" after "livable city." We populate our urban areas to the point of degradation, then abandon them. Our cities, like so many other products of contemporary life, are disposable. The advance of technology, the change from a manufacturing to a service and information-based economy and the accumulation of private wealth have made it possible for people and commerce to settle pretty much where they please. And settle we do -- over and over and over. The average American moves 11 times in a lifetime; nearly one-fifth of the population relocates each year. How long can this search for a "better place" continue before we have trashed them all?

TAKE A STROLL THROUGH OCCIDENTAL PARK, a brick-and-tree-lined commons just off First Avenue downtown. Homeless men loiter there; many curl up at night in the doorways of the hip coffee shops along First Avenue. Panhandlers energetically hustle the tourists, and crack dealers have made the corners around the well-known Pike Place Market their domain. Recent acts of gay-bashing have shaken the sanctity of downtown neighborhoods; racial attacks have unnerved city high schools. The school system is faced with large classes and an ineffective bureaucracy. Courts are overcrowded; plans for a new county jail are in the offing. Local businesses -- among them Weyerhauser, Boeing, major banks and airlines -- have recently announced layoffs. "It's a healthy economy, but it has plateaued," says Jim Hubert, editor of the Seattle-Everett Real Estate Research Report.

Seattle, more than most cities, is wary of outsiders. The relatively low housing prices of the mid-1980's attracted many equity-rich Californians, who sold their $750,000 homes in places like Orange County and bought similar houses here for a third of the price. Others bought inexpensive houses with good views and then tore them down and built neo-mansions in their place, raising tax assessments throughout the neighborhood. (Though the real-estate and home-construction boom abruptly ended in the past six months, the price of a home in neighborhoods like Queen Anne and Capitol Hill runs as high as half a million dollars.) Aggravating anti-outsider sentiment was the disclosure a few months ago that the Pike Place Market is actually owned by a Manhattan-based property management firm. Nor does it sit well that the city's professional baseball team, the Mariners, is owned by a businessman from Indianapolis, its football team by a California developer.