We like to think we are so amazing here in Massachusetts, especially in Greater Boston – the envy of the nation, if not the world.

To any doubters, we can simply point to development boom that is seeing new tower and research palaces take shape from downtown Boston to Route 128 as evidence that everyone wants to be in the Hub of the Universe.

But while there is certainly a lot going on by local standards, we are far from a unique success story, with the Boston area outperformed by several major metro markets in both total construction and job growth.

We barely make the top 10 in development and we are a disappointing No. 14 for job growth, according to a pair of Forbes surveys.

In fact, sky-high home prices may be the only area in which we are one of the undisputed champions; we have some of the highest housing costs in the country. Unfortunately, that’s not due not to any positive attribute, but rather to our maddening inability to build the kind of modest, starter homes needed to ease the crunch.

“The last 20 years have been pretty good for cities in general,” noted one former top City Hall development official. “The cities are thriving. But if we don’t build more housing, we will just be another little boutique city.”

Forbes’ annual survey of the biggest development boom cities in the country should be a wakeup call for all our insufferably parochial and arrogant local pols, who too often think the world ends at I-495.

There were $5.5 billion in office, retail and housing starts in the Greater Boston area in 2014, with the region defined as everything within 495, with Southern New Hampshire thrown in, according to Forbes, which used stats supplied by Dodge analytics.

Scott Van Voorhis

That was actually down 10 percent from 2013, when the late Thomas M. Menino, during his last year as mayor, went nuts greenlighting just about every big project awaiting approval at City Hall in an unabashed move to cement his legacy.

But that number is puny compared to the $25 billion in new construction Houston saw during the same period, much of it driven by the then-booming oil industry.

The New York metro market, our much larger archrival, was not far behind, with an amazing $23.3 billion in construction starts.

But even more like-size cities had more construction as well. The Washington, D.C., area came in at almost double the Boston number, at $9.5 billion, making it No. 4, riding a 13 percent jump.

Atlanta came in No. 7, at $6.1 billion, while Miami, following a 19 percent boost in construction activity, weighed in at No. 8 with an even $6 billion.

Hey, at least we made the top 10.

Impoverished Pygmies

When it comes to the Boston area’s supposedly vaunted economy, with all its cutting-edge local tech and life sciences companies, the numbers are even less impressive.

This time we don’t even make the top 10 – you won’t find the Boston metro market until No. 14 on Forbes list of the fastest-growing cities in 2015.

The Boston area is expected to see our population grow by 1.1 percent, with job growth of 2.1 percent. Median income is $70,000, hardly a princely sum given how much it costs to buy a home or rent an apartment in within the 495 beltway.

At No. 10, San Antonio is really kicking compared to us, with population growth of nearly 2 percent and job growth of 3 percent.

Or take Austin, which comes in at a lofty No. 2, with 3 percent job growth, a local population growing by 2.5 percent and a median income of $63,000.

A university town like Boston, Austin is a great place to live, while the median home price, at $272,250, is a steal compared to Greater Boston.

There were more than 11,000 construction starts on new homes in the Austin area during the first half of the year, a number that was actually represented a drop of 5 percent. By contrast, Boston officials were celebrating the fact that they had permitted more than 2,400 new condos and homes during the first seven months of the year.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why Austin housing prices are so much lower.

So why are we sitting here thinking we are so awesome, when many other cities are building more and creating far more new jobs than we are?

It doesn’t help that the vast majority of New England’s wealth and population is concentrated within 495, making the Boston area the rich giant among relatively impoverished pygmies like Providence, Worcester, Springfield and Manchester.

We are a whale in a goldfish pond.

But the myth of Greater Boston exceptionalism has also been deliberately nurtured by decades of ingrown political leadership, with mayors like Menino, or Flynn and White before him, trumpeting local successes and showing little or no real interest in what other metropolises around the country were doing.

It’s all left us with the feeling that we are somehow flooded or overburdened with an unprecedented amount of new development, fueling short-sighted, NIMBY opposition to a range of projects, from shopping centers to new condos.

And that only makes it harder to come to grips with the reality that we aren’t building enough, especially when it comes to housing, to keep pace with even modest population and job growth.

Let’s face it: As long as we think of ourselves as the Hub of all things awesome, then we will remain just an overgrown town with a bunch of fancy suburbs masquerading as a big city.