Adelaide's Homelessness Crisis Isn't About Lack of Homes

Last week, a South Australian minister declared that drastic moves are underway to call a homelessness emergency. The headlines say the system is failing and a new report has found exactly that, the system is failing South Australians. Everyone's reading it and thinking the same thing: we need more funding, more beds, more housing, more charities, more support workers to help people off the streets.

That's the obvious answer and it's also not the actual problem.

I want to talk about what I see when I look at that headline, because what I see is exactly what I'm finding in every sector right now, from corporate burnout to healthcare waiting lists to insurance claims backlogs. The system isn't broken because there aren't enough resources. The system is broken because the system itself was designed for people who aren't homeless.

Think about that for a moment. When someone is sleeping rough in Adelaide, they don't have a mailing address. They can't get mail for proof of address, which means they can't open a bank account or get government benefits. They can't make phone calls at set times because they're sleeping rough and their phone battery is dead and they don't know where they'll be tomorrow morning. They can't fill out an online form because they don't have consistent internet. They can't attend appointments on Tuesday at 2pm because shelter spaces aren't guaranteed and they might be at the other end of the city trying to access basic services.

Every single system that's supposed to help them was built with the assumption that people have a home. A postal address. A phone that's always charged. A place to sit and fill out paperwork. A stable location where you can plan to be on Tuesday at 2pm. The systems don't flex for people outside that box because they were never designed with those people in mind.

So when you add more funding to a broken system, you get more of the same system. You get more people trying to navigate processes that fundamentally don't work for them. You might get more beds but the person accessing them still has to fill out the form that requires proof of address. You might get more support workers but the person still has to remember a phone appointment when they don't have a phone charged and they don't know where they'll sleep that night.

This is what I mean when I say the system is broken. It's not broken because there's a lack of goodwill or effort. It's broken because nobody asked the people sleeping rough what system they actually need to navigate.

Here's where I'm going to connect this to something you might not expect. This is exactly what happens inside organisations all the time. A company comes to me and Karen and they say their staff are leaving, they're burnt out, they're stressed, we need better mental health support or flexible working or wellness programs. They're looking at the symptom and assuming they understand the cause. They think the problem is that people aren't resilient enough or they're not managing their stress well or they need better work-life balance.

What we actually find when we listen to the people is that they're trying to navigate a system that doesn't work. They're trying to get a decision from someone but the approval chain requires five people in three different departments who don't talk to each other. They're trying to finish a project but the process for getting resources requires submitting a form that takes three hours to complete. They're trying to do their job but the system was designed for people in the office and they're remote. They're trying to progress in their career but nobody actually explained how progression works.

The system is working perfectly for whoever designed it. It's just that it doesn't work for the people actually trying to move through it.

When you add wellness days and mental health support and gym memberships to that broken system, you get people who are supported while they're drowning. You get people who take a yoga class and then go back to navigating a system that wasn't built with them in mind. The band-aid gets bigger and prettier and the underlying wound doesn't heal.

This is what we do at Fix the System. We don't come in and tell you what you need. Using our EVA model, we engage with the people who are actually in the system and we ask them what's blocking them. We listen and we investigate and we look at what you've already built and what you've already tried. We validate it with the people who are living it and we validate it with you and we find the actual cause, not the symptom.

So when that Adelaide minister admits the system is failing, what I want you to hear is not a story about homelessness or about housing or about inadequate resources. What I want you to hear is the most important sentence in that headline: the system is failing. Not the people. Not the effort. The system itself.

If your organisation is feeling that same pressure right now, if you're hearing that people are struggling and you're wondering what to do about it, then maybe you need to ask the same question Adelaide needs to ask: not how do we add more to support people, but how do we redesign the system so people can actually move through it.

That's where we start the conversation.