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.”