If there’s one thing that we do better here in Greater Boston than almost anywhere else in the country, it’s this: Inventing new real estate bubbles.

Even as we dig out from the mess caused by the collapse in home prices, here comes an increasingly overheated apartment market to inflate a whole new bubble. From downtown Boston to soon-to-be-bulldozed farmland out along the Interstate-495 corridor, condos are dead and apartments are king.

Developers are tearing up blueprints for condos and new offices and rushing to get into the ground with apartments, apartments and more apartments, from new suburban developments to downtown rental towers.

There’s even giddy talk of the rise of Renter America that will help reshape the American dream and make apartment dwellers the envy of all those hapless mortgage slaves out there.

“A whopping [number] of U.S. adults have debunked the myth that owning a house is the American Dream,” proclaimed Rent.com in announcing a New American Dream essay contest, with a top prize of $10,000 in free rent.

If a little red warning light is going off for you right now, well that’s good, because there is a lot to be skeptical about. Maybe there’s a paradigm shift truly taking place in American culture – I doubt it, but more on that later.

But the apartment gold rush that is taking place in Greater Boston should trigger a few alarm bells of its own. It’s too early to say that history is about to repeat itself, but given our penchant for boom/bust real estate cycles, there is reason to be wary.

Latest In A Long Line

After lagging for years, new apartment construction is poised to go from zero to 60 overnight.

More than 2,000 new apartments are in the pipeline in Boston itself, including a new tower at the Prudential complex set to begin construction in the fall.

And thousands more are poised to move into construction across the suburbs, including Legacy Farms in Hopkinton, one of the largest new residential developments in New England.

“You are seeing a flood of rental buildings going up,” said Thomas Skahen of Littleton-based PrimeTime Communities, which is expanding beyond its base marketing condo and home projects to work with new apartment developments.

Certainly, some of the stats look promising. There’s been no significant new apartment construction in Boston for years and new rentals have lagged in the suburbs as well.

At a time when home sales are mired in a seemingly never-ending slump, apartment rents jumped 7 percent last year in Boston and its suburbs, and are poised for another big jump this year.

But history shows such real estate gold rushes typically end badly here in the Boston market.

Just take the late, great telecom hotel boom, which saw developers spent untold millions to buy up otherwise low value warehouses. The plan was to turn these old industrial spaces into high-tech data hubs – telecom hotels – that would be leased to fast-growing telecom companies.

When the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, it pulled out the rug. And the developer who spent millions transforming the old Casey & Hayes warehouse overlooking the Mass. Turnpike into Boston Internet City lost his shirt, as did others (that building, by the way, still sits empty, though it’s now owned by Harvard).

That was followed by the downtown luxury condo gold rush – we all know how that one turned out. At its peak, you had developers trying to build downtown-style condo developments in places like Woonsocket, R.I.

And let’s not forget the luxury hotel mini-boom. Overlapping with the downtown condo boom, it gave us the now-bankrupt W Boston. Maybe there was a need for another top-shelf hotel, but did we really need five or six?

A Paradigm Shift? No.

The fact is, the real estate market is tricky here and it can fool even the best developers.

Given the dearth of buildable land and Greater Boston’s anti-development, not-in-my-backyard culture, shortages of everything from condos to high-end hotel rooms are constantly forming.

Once we get to a tipping point, a developer or two manages to get projects into the ground and make out like bandits.

Soon, the rush is on. And, in their haste to build the next apartment complex or telecom hotel, developers forget they are dealing with a finite amount of pent-up demand – not good, old-fashioned population growth.

But maybe this time is different? After all, the foreclosure crisis has created a lot of unhappy former homeowners. Maybe there really is a paradigm shift going on.

Well dream on, for the apartment boom will go bust as soon as the market for homes and condos picks up again.

Many of the new crop of renters aren’t signing apartment leases because it’s hip. Rather, with banks skittish about mortgages, they’ve been temporarily squeezed out of the ownership market.

Nor can these new rentals compete with the variety and adaptability of single-family homes.

Yes, all those new apartments will be tempting, but one looks about the same as another as builders pump out a flood of cookie-cutter units.

And if you want to start a family, well better start saving up for a down payment. Most these new rental developments, especially in the suburbs, have been capped at two bedrooms by local officials to keep all those expensive school kids out.

Before you know it, all that pent-up demand for new apartments will have been met. Two, maybe three years from now, we will start reading about half empty suburban apartment spreads, their renters having left to buy a starter home or condo.

For developers, then, the key is to get in, get rented up, and get out.

And above all, don’t be the last guy in the ground with your new apartment tower.