The Greater Boston office market, from downtown Boston to Interstate 495, increasingly looks grossly overbuilt. And maybe not even that old remedy, time, will be enough to bring it back to life.

The fact is we have had little consequential job growth over the past 14 years, according to federal labor statistics. Yet developers, optimists that they are, have added tens of millions of square feet of space over the same time, from new high-rises to sprawling suburban campuses.

Now, with job growth slow at best after the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression, it may finally be high time to face the fact that we simply have too much office space. And not simply in terms of a million or two million unwanted square feet, but a whopping 40 million square feet of empty corporate suites.

And with no hint of rising demand anytime in the near future to start filling it all.

“We have no demand drivers,” noted one suburban developer turned bearish by the tough economy. “Where there is no demand, there is no value.”

Space, No Fillers

This is not a majority view, of course. The commercial real estate firms out there, while they do a fine job of market tracking, are in the business of leasing and selling office space.

But certainly some bearish office investors are looking at these fundamentals and weighing whether to bet on the Boston market or some fast-growing southern city.

As evidence, I recently took a peak at a presentation the local developer cited above made to one of the country’s biggest investment funds. Basically, the advice was “head south, boys and girls” – as in Charlotte, Columbia and Atlanta. Not Rhode Island.

Let’s look at two very revealing numbers.

The first is the overall size of the Boston metro office market, basically the city and all suburbs, far and wide.

That market totaled 165 million square feet back in 1998, according to Colliers International in Boston, when everyone in real estate was scrambling to lease or sell a building to some future dot.com billionaire.

Eager to meet this seeming boom in demand, developers added another roughly 45 million square feet of space, bringing the total size of the Greater Boston market up to almost 210 million square feet as of the first quarter, Colliers reports.

The construction came in two boomlets – in the years leading up to the dot.com bust in 2000 and 2001, and then another, smaller burst in the middle of the 2000s when a housing-driven economy appeared to be on the rebound.

The only problem is that the number of jobs hasn’t measurably increased since 1998. A short-lived spike during the dot.com bubble was wiped out soon after. Those jobs painstakingly gained back during the 2000s were then wiped out during the last recession.

Yes, the Boston area has actually been able to add a few jobs over the last two years during our slow-growth recovery, but we are basically back to where we started in the late 90s. The Boston metro market had 2,443,000 jobs at the end of 2011, up slightly from 2,426,000 jobs at the end of 1998.

That’s a gain of 17,000 jobs over 14 years – the only good thing about it is that it’s a gain, not a loss.

Based on standard industry measurements, that’s enough growth to possibly justify an additional 4.5 million square feet of new office space,

Instead, we wound up with 45 million square feet, not 4.5 million. To put things in perspective, that’s enough empty space to fill 40-plus Prudential towers, or, for that matter, 40-plus corporate campuses out in the suburbs.

Here To Stay?

It’s not a pretty picture, and if present trends continue, all that empty space will be with us for some years to come.

Overall office vacancy for the entire Boston market hovers around 20 percent, with that number well above 20 percent along big stretches of the I-495 area, where some buildings have sat empty since the dot.com bust a decade ago.

That doesn’t mean that some submarkets won’t rise above it all, such as Back Bay, where rents are soaring and vacancy rates are in the single digits and dropping.

But for buildings to start filling up along 495 – or, for that matter, the empty lower floors of a number of Financial District towers – we will need some substantial job growth. Except the outlook for another big growth spurt, at least in the next few years and over the longer-term as well, isn’t that great.

The Boston area has become a magnet for a handful of high-paying, innovation-driven fields, including life sciences and some parts of the sprawling high-tech industry.

Yet despite all the local growth by the Shires and the Googles of the world, it has not been enough to get the Boston-area economy out of what increasingly appears to be a long-term stall.

The problem is, when it comes to job growth, the Boston region’s high costs of living and doing business has New England’s economic powerhouse in a stranglehold.

The Boston area added jobs all through the 1980s and right up to the end of the 1990s.

But that job growth hit a wall just as the costs of living and doing business began to escalate to unsustainable levels, with soaring housing prices driving middle-class workers out of state.

Sure, housing prices have come down a bit, but it’s just plain silly to say real estate values are affordable when the median sale price in Middlesex County weighs in at $354,000, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

Without workers and population growth, you can’t have job growth.

And without job growth, there is simply no demand for all that empty office space out there across Greater Boston – let alone any new buildings.