This election season, no small amount of hot air has been wasted lamenting Massachusetts’ (and America’s) crumbling infrastructure – from both sides of the aisle.

But improving our physical infrastructure means little if this state’s less obvious, but no less important, infrastructure isn’t also reinforced, re-worked or otherwise repaired.

We’ve been hearing much lately of a boom in refinance activity, fueled by homeowners reluctant to sell and buy, but nonetheless eager to capitalize on historically low interest rates.

On the surface, the news offers a tinge of warmth as the days get shorter and nights colder. But much like the sun’s rays only warm the top few feet of a deep, dark ocean, the trends underpinning the feel-good surface of the refinance boom remain cold and merciless.

After watching many in our banking and real estate industries either sit idle – or worse, fade away – during the past few years, a sudden influx of new work can’t help but be seen as a godsend.

But in our eagerness to embrace this short-term uptick in business, we may have chosen to ignore a disturbing longer-term trend: This boom is kind of a bust.

The news in the first half of 2010 was dominated by optimism, high hopes for housing recovery driven by generous government incentives and long-caged demand.

But as those heady days faded and Uncle Sam’s deep pockets turned shallow, attention turned away from purchase activity, and towards refinances. In a sales market expended in a frenzy of incentive-fueled greed, even the most prudent among us could not and would not ignore the siren song of historically low rates.

But our own reporting shows that even with government-fueled purchases driving the first half, and even with absurdly low rates pushing us along in the second half, total 2010 mortgage originations still look to be roughly 30 percent below historic yearly averages.

Why, then, is everybody so busy?

Herein lies the aforementioned infrastructure problem. After years of decay, our lending and appraisal infrastructure seems almost beyond repair.

At the onset of the crisis, appraisers were scapegoated by lenders and agents as being complicit in nefarious price-fixing schemes during the bubble years. The resulting public policy, intended to ensure their independence, only served to hobble them with ludicrously low compensation and unrealistic work demands.

In that environment, who can be blamed for calling it quits? The industry has lost almost a third of its capacity in the past few years. Were the appraisal industry a roadway or public works project, it would have crumbled long ago for lack of materials.

So now, a diminished workload is left to an even more depleted workforce. It makes us cringe to contemplate a return to historic norms, if even modest business is termed a “boom.”

And don’t expect that diminished capacity to simply get picked up by growth or fresh blood – the same policies that killed compensation also de-incentivized the kind of mentorship upon which the industry relies.

Our lending infrastructure is also badly out of whack. Conditioned by the past few years to avoid even the slightest risk, loan originators have taken to erecting stop signs all along the road to homeownership, granting the green light only to those that are supremely qualified.

Lenders are sitting on piles of federal and private cash, and could build a sparkling homeownership highway with that money – one that does little good if nobody can travel down it.

Boom or no boom, we’re glad to take the business we’ve been given. But we also aren’t content with, and won’t settle for, current business levels being simply “good enough” to keep us busy. We’re optimistic to think that some day, hopefully some day soon, we’ll return to a more historic level of business.

But before we do, our industry infrastructure is going to need a serious upgrade.