My name is Fiona Coughlin, and I am the CEO of Habitat for Humanity in Windsor-Essex. We are an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity Canada, whom you heard from previously. We're basically the boots on the ground that get the houses built.

I've also built personally in Kenya, and I'll be building in Nepal later this year. While I was in Kenya, we learned about compressed soil blocks that were made of rammed earth. It was an innovative way to build houses using the limited resources in Kenya. That is core to what transformed my view on 3-D printing.

We took on a project, as I'm sure you've heard, that was initiated by Habitat for Humanity Canada in collaboration with our local University of Windsor, which has the largest structural engineering lab in the country, and a 3-D printer company. All were all seeking funding from CMHC. CMHC said they needed Habitat on this to make sure that the end result is affordable homes for people to live in.

We were successful in creating Canada's first 3-D printed homes that were permitted for residential use. There are lots of experimental builds that happen from time to time. If you're not working with your city officials, planners and builders, the end result is a structure that does not achieve occupancy. We were the first to achieve occupancy.

It was also the first multi-unit 3-D printed structure in North America. It was the first in North America that was built with concrete rather than a cementitious mortar. The concrete's slightly more environmentally friendly and structurally better. At the time of completion in 2022, it was the largest 3-D printed building in North America. We count this as a huge success.

I also noted that this committee is very interested in accessibility. One of the side benefits of taking on an innovative project was that local partners came out of the woodwork. Locally, we have a virtual reality cave that actually made a virtual reality model of the house before we even got it out of the ground. We tested a wheelchair through this virtual reality model, and it buzzed at you whenever you hit the walls. At the end of this project, we had four units in a self-contained home. The homes are fully accessible and net-zero ready, and they comply with all local planning and building regulations for residential use.

On the same site, our partners built modular construction. We found that our 3-D printed structures saved $5 per square foot, but we know that this is actually going to improve as projects like this scale up.

We also got from site plan to completion in seven months, and for those people who know anything about building, that's an incredible feat. A lot of people will chalk it up to 3-D printing being so fast, but I would say it was through the collaboration we built with our local municipality and the partners on the project that we got it done.

We're now researching and studying. At the exact same time as we built the house, we poured 3-D printed sample walls, and those samples are now being tested at the University of Windsor.

You can park 90 cars on these houses. If a tornado hits Leamington—or a hurricane, as is happening in the world right now—these houses will probably be the only ones left standing. We've had the houses in use for two years. As a builder, we have a Tarion warranty. Usually when people finish their first year, there are all kinds of deficiencies like nail pops and other things that they have to fix in the first year; there are no reported deficiencies in these houses.

The laboratory research is ongoing. There are some printed studies by Dr. Marcos Silveira on the sample components, but it's all very exciting.

We know that if we scale up, the printer costs can be spread out over more homes. If you think about a printer at home, instead of writing additional copies of something by hand, as we used to do, you now photocopy or you now print multiple copies. It's the exact same concept, but with houses. If you're using the same design over and over again, that's how you save money on these houses.

Our houses were also over-engineered, because we were trying to meet the building code that currently exists, and—