Jamaica's hosting of matches in the soon-to-be-held Cricket World Cup has ignited a fair bit of reflection on Kingston's blight and the strained efforts, with patchy outcomes, at urban renewal.

Indeed, with just over a month to go before the tournament opens, officials are scrambling to place an acceptable façade on communities near or adjacent to Sabina Park, the cricket stadium which taxpayers have paid dearly to refurbish. At best, the refurbishment will be cosmetic. A few roads will be resurfaced, some verges trimmed and some curbs whitewashed. Maybe, too, a couple of concrete walls will replace rusty galvanised zinc as perimeter fence.

In the end, though, Kingston's inner-city communities will remain largely the same: a stressed housing stock with run-down infrastructure. But worse, there will still be no apparently coherent plan to address the problem, except perhaps that the National Housing Trust (NHT), the Government's primary shelter agency, and private sector developers, will be placing more and more homes outside the city. The upshot: a wider and wider urban sprawl with all the social and infrastructural issues that follow such rapid urbanisation.

It seems to us that the current focus on the problems of the capital provides an opportunity for a serious rethink on the issue of urban renewal, much of which, we suspect, can be achieved at a fraction of the cost which those in authority are now prepared to spend.

Three years ago, the Government, through the NHT, programmed to spend $5 billion for the development of decent, low-rise apartment complexes in several blighted communities. Those that have been completed are of a quality that anyone should be proud to occupy.

Yet, there are pertinent factors which are likely to make this model of urban renewal impractical on the scale for it to be transformational. First, there is the matter of cost.

The budget for the project is now $15 billion, three times the original projection, which suggests that the kind of capital outlay required for success will be unavailable in the short term. Second, while modern, well-appointed complexes have been built, decay engulfs much of the surrounding community.

The issue, therefore, is how to achieve the required renewal on an affordable basis. Part of the answer, we would suggest, lies in the housing stock in many of the communities suffering from urban blight. It remains relatively good in communities such as Rollington Town, Vineyard Town, Kingston Gardens, Rae Town and Bournemouth Gardens. Additionally, many of the people who live in these communities are employees who pay taxes, including contribution to the NHT, but whose incomes, even with an NHT benefit, would not allow them to purchase homes in new developments.

It would seem to us, therefore, that it would not be beyond the NHT, working with other government agencies and private sector partners, to develop special mortgage programmes for people in these communities to refurbish homes on an organised basis. We know that many of these houses are not owner-occupied. In this event, owners who resist would be forced into the programme with rental incomes covering their mortgage obligations. In some cases, the state may just have to appropriate the real estate and enforce its right to eminent domain to get projects going.

Of course, any such programme has to be underpinned with the appropriate social infrastructure.