Instead of the usual dinner party property tales of capital gain and idyllic indoor-outdoor flow, the stories these women tell are much more alarming.
"Emergency housing in some regions is 99 per cent full, but in Auckland it is 150 per cent," says Ms Barton. "In the west alone, we have 600 people on the waiting list."
"The Ministry for Social Development has offered $2 million for emergency housing.
That's things like motel rooms," adds Ms Hickey. "But people require homes. A motel room is not going to fix the situation. It's a bandaid, but when it runs out, what then?"
The Housing Call to Action group has done more than just wring their hands. The loose assemblage of some 175 social, local and central government organisations all work around clients with severe housing needs.
At their core is a belief that solving housing insecurity would cascade into solving any number of other expensive social problems - kids switching schools too frequently to achieve or be noticed or join in sporting or development activities, families moving too often to hook into social support or get to work on time, damp housing causing health issues, and on it goes.
Rather than producing statistics, reports or economic impact studies (though they can access those hard data) the HC2A have something more powerful in their housing-first approach - 10 years of grass roots action.
This week their focus is on Spotlight on Housing Week, culminating in a date not many of us would have in our diaries, World Homelessness Day, this Saturday.
"We have no shortage of stories, people can get quite fired up," says Ms Hickey. "We want to raise awareness because people don't see the hidden homeless.
Street homelessness is confronting, but people don't see the folks living in cars, getting ready for school and work before they drop the kids off.
In summer if you drive around, you can see garage doors open and families living in there. The caravan parks are always full."
The group works out of West, a busy community centre next to Henderson shopping centre that provides adult education, a remnant of the glorious Workers' Educational Association movement of the turn of last century.
Its funding from the Department of Internal Affairs' Enterprising Communities project is coming to an end.
The week's actions range from the optimistically titled "How New Zealand can end homelessness" workshops to Making Homes Happen, a guide for developing affordable housing that brings together the infrastructure development, Community Housing Aotearoa and Auckland Council people with case studies, step by step processes, regulation guides and more.
There are real-time actions - Child Poverty Action Hikoi for Homelessness, a sausage sizzle, the Salvation Army selling ribbons and gingerbread men, alongside social media (Facebook, Twitter, Givealittle donations for lockers and sleeping bags for rough sleepers).
But the actions that Ms Hickey and Ms Barton know will really hammer home the message of hidden homelessness are low tech and real.
People can go to libraries in West Auckland to write out how housing shortages, or being homeless, has affected them. Cut-out paper dolls, one for every family on a housing waiting list, will adorn public offices and spaces, street theatre will deck out cars with beds on roundabouts.
Children have already been sending in drawings and haiku about their homelessness, or reaction to other people's.
"The children have empathy," says Ms Hickey. "One child wrote 'I am broke to bits I no longer have a place. How can I feel safe?' another: 'I am very cold, I don't feel right in the car, when will I be safe?' It's not about economists and policies, it's about people on the ground. Our work is to raise awareness in a community of what's happening in that community."
Ms Hickey points to tenancy laws that need to support long-term security - the HC2A has made a difference in their local territory.
They set up a social enterprise to help manage properties themselves, created the Ranui caravan park hub with health, social and employment services around a "community broker", and drew up the housing warrant of fitness guidelines which might even gain traction through the legislative minefield.
