Massachusetts may be adding jobs, but the battered office market is not out of the woods yet.

Just take a look at what is happening out on the I-495 office and innovation belt.

The amount of vacant office space has hit 32 percent along the 495 West corridor – the highest since the start of the Great Recession, CresaPartners reports. It’s a key stretch of economic territory that ranges from Framingham to Hudson.

Rents are down as well – to $21.75 and $14.50 for Class A and Class B office buildings respectively.

Looks like Bay State lawmakers won’t be heading back to Beacon Hill to take another shot at passing a gambling bill.

Senate President Therese Murray apparently can’t come up with the votes to bring here members back from the beach to do some extra work.

But don’t count out the gambling boosters – and our tough-as-nails local racetrack owners – just yet.

Despite some ominous cuts and layoffs, there’s no chance embattled local racetracks while Suffolk Downs or Plainridge will go the way of Revere’s Wonderland and kick the bucket.

While Suffolk has slashed purse money for winning horses and Plainridge axed about a quarter of its payroll, both tracks are retrenching in hopes of making another push for expanded gambling come 2011, insiders say.

Despite the last minute collapse of this year’s bill, track owners and other gambling boosters came within an inch of getting what they wanted – and they know it.

For the first time, both the House and Senate voted in favor of a gambling bill – and by sizeable margins.

One insider likens Suffolk Downs lead investor Richard Fields, who helped build the Seminoles a casino, as akin to someone furiously pumping money into a slot machine, unwilling to give up his seat to the next customer.

Maybe luck hasn’t been with him, but why give up now and let the next guy hit the jackpot?

“That spirit will keep us going for another year,’’ this veteran observer of the long-running Bay State gambling debate recently told me.

Sounds about right to me.

I can’t speak to the FBI’s ability to catch crooks.

But when it comes to the job of finding a site to build a new Boston headquarters, the G-men are blowing it.

In a hunt that has gone on almost as long as the search for Whitey, the feds began scouring Boston and its environs back in early 2007 for a place to build a new, high-tech security fortress.

But nearly three years later, there’s no sign that the FBI - whose real estate search, to be fair, is being handled by the General Service Administration – is close to landing anywhere.

In fact, the search has gone on so long there’s even concern that someone pencil pusher down in Washington will cut the money out of the federal budget for the project.

Now the mystery deepens, with state officials now talking about moving the U.S. Postal Service’s mail sorting plant to a location that has been eyed for agency’s new headquarters.

It’s not clear where that leaves the FBI, which supposedly had been torn between building in Boston or in neighboring Chelsea.

Sadly, this is the very kind of real, tangible stimulus project – not silly pothole filling – that is needed to help pump some badly needed jobs and cash into our sagging Greater Boston economy.

We are talking about a $200 million development project that could generate as many as 500 construction jobs.

As I wrote in my B&T column back in January, it’s time for the FBI to pick a site and get building.

“It’s like the government does not look at any of these things in the big picture of everything that is going on,’’ Joe Torpy, a veteran Boston real estate lawyer, complained a few months back. “This guy has a job filling a pothole when you could have 500 guys working on a new building.’’

Back in the 1980s it was the oil-rich Saudis and Japanese that went on an office tower buying spree, both in the Hub and in other major metro markets.

The 1990s saw the Germans get into the game, with the Irish emerging in the past decade with an appetite for high-rent Newbury Street buildings.

Now the Chinese are getting into the game, with a big assist by Harvard University.

Having been hit hard by the commercial real estate downturn, Harvard is looking to downsize its $5.4 billion commercial real estate investment portfolio.

It’s a sizeable – and apparently struggling – chunk of Harvard’s overall $26 billion investment portfolio.

With US investors down on their luck right now, China, through its sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp., has emerged as a potential buyer of Harvard’s investment assets, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Apparently, the Chinese have some money to burn right now – CIC is sitting on a $300 billion pot of cash.

Not alone, foreign investors, from Canada to Kuwait, snapped up more than $2 billion in towers and other commercial real estate across the U.S. during the second quarter, the Journal reports, citing Real Capital Analytics.

Can this guy ever catch a break?

In a development market where getting anything built takes sheer grit and determination, John Rosenthal stands out.

The head of Newton-based housing developer Meredith Management and an anti-gun crusader known for his provocative Turnpike billboards by Fenway Park, Rosenthal doesn’t give up easily.

In fact, Rosenthal has been pushing plans for a major air-rights project that would span the Turnpike near Fenway Park since the 1990s.

Now, close to making his dreams of a major Fenway air-rights project a reality, the long-suffering developer is facing what looks to be one last hurdle.

CommonWealth REIT, formerly known as HRPT, is suing the city of Boston and city zoning officials to stop Rosenthal’s One Fenway plan and the revamp of the Yawkey commuter rail stop in a major rail and bus hub, the Boston Courant reports.

The move comes with Rosenthal in the final stages of hammering out a financing package for his $500 million plan, having spent years lining up the needed city and state permits.

If nothing else, this may be one expensive hurdle for Rosenthal to clear.

CommonWealth, which owns a small parking lot in the path of a planned access road into the new Yawkey Station, has made it clear it wants to be compensated, and then some, for its real estate.

The real estate investment trust has proposed to Rosenthal that the developer deliver, for free, 225 garage parking spaces in exchange for the 85 surface lot spaces it now controls. That’s a $10 million-plus proposition.

Meanwhile, in a bizarre twist, the lead attorney for CommonWealth in its suit is none other than wife of the MBTA’s general manager, the Herald reports. Of course, the T is heavily involved with plans for a new Yawkey Station, which involves more than $12 million in public money.

Needless to say, if CommonWealth’s suit is successful, that dollar amount stands to jump again.