A Tauranga midwife says she's been to a number of unplanned home births in cold houses where she's needed the light of her cellphone to see what she's doing.
Kelly Pidgeon's submission to Labour, the Green Party and the Maori Party's inquiry into homelessness is one of hundreds documenting the struggles of families living in substandard housing or on the street.
The inquiry is on a national tour and hit Tauranga on Monday, having already heard from submitters in Auckland.
Ms Pidgeon says life for the families she worked with in the eastern Bay of Plenty was sometimes difficult.
"They're living in a house where they've got no money to pay the growing power bills and issues with the houses generally not having any other heat form and having to pay quite high power bills to supply energy to the house," she said.
"Usually what happens in those situations is that eventually the power gets cut off and the house is freezing."
She believes the high cost of renting means families have to sacrifice other necessities like power and heating.
It leaves families with few options but to have an unplanned birth at home because they don't have a way to get to the hospital quick enough, Ms Pidgeon says.
"I've been to a few of them where they're not your ideal home birth situation, it's not something someone's planned to do. It's just they've got no resources for petrol, no one around to give them a ride. They've called me to attend because the baby's coming."
She says those kinds of situations are "risky", especially if an emergency procedure for the baby is necessary.
"Thankfully that hasn't happened, but doing that in the dark I can't imagine that being particularly fun."
The families she worked with in the eastern bays were sometimes quite rural so getting an ambulance to the house took "a reasonable amount of time".
Ms Pidgeon, who has been in New Zealand for almost a decade and has worked in the Tauranga area for around three years, even set up a free 0800 number so families could call her without having to worry about cost.
"I took the cost of the call because I didn't want there to ever be a barrier for them to access healthcare."
She says she wanted to make a submission to the inquiry in the hopes that something is done.
National declined to be part of the cross-party inquiry, saying it's already doing work on the homelessness problem.
Labour then accused National of putting politics ahead of people.
But the politics doesn't worry Ms Pidgeon.
"I don't care who does what, as long as someone does something."
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