San Francisco and Sioux Falls might seem to share little beyond an abbreviation, but the cities wrestle with a common problem: homelessness. Now the two regions are set to test a new approach to controlling homelessness by targeting the link between housing instability and incarceration. The Just Home Project, devised and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and coordinated by the Urban Institute, will provide resources and technical assistance to four jurisdictions across the U.S. that struggle with different variations on the jail-to-homelessness cycle: South Carolina's Charleston County, Oklahoma's Tulsa County, South Dakota's Minnehaha County, and the city and county of San Francisco. The broader goal is to get counties to address the specific barriers that recently incarcerated individuals face when trying to access existing housing. "Homelessness, housing insecurity and participation in the criminal justice system are just simply deeply intertwined, in part because of the criminalization of homelessness itself," said Kelly Walsh, a principal policy associate at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center. Laurie Garduque, the director of criminal justice at the MacArthur Foundation, stresses that the initiative is designed specifically to support the jail population. Garduque hopes that learning from these local projects could help secure national-level solutions. "We think that if the barriers to housing can be addressed, the footprint of the criminal justice system will shrink," she said.