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There’s a word often tossed around Vancouver council meetings lately that might sound odd to the untrained ear: “MIRHPP.”

It rhymes with “burp.”

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It stands for Moderate Income Rental Housing Pilot Program, and city staff, politicians and many others hope MIRHPP will achieve what an earlier program could not: produce rental housing that’s affordable for low-to-medium-income households.

Vancouver City Hall has, for years, tried to encourage developers to build rental housing, as the city’s vacancy rate stubbornly remained near zero.

But while a developer’s typical profit margin on a private-market condo project in Vancouver could be 15 per cent, a rental project might yield about six per cent, said Dan Garrison, Vancouver’s assistant director of housing policy. That differential means the city must offer incentives, Garrison said, to push developers to build rental.

There was a time not long ago in Vancouver, Garrison said, that “no one was building rental at all and (they) weren’t even looking at or considering building rental.”