City officials insist they’re making progress at Mass and Cass in the South End, the epicenter of drug dealing in Boston, but their own statistics show little change in crowd size and only a fraction of those in transitional housing graduating to permanent residences.

Tania Del Rio, a former city council candidate from East Boston recently installed as a top coordinator in the city’s efforts to address the crisis at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, gave residents an in-depth look at the city’s recovery metrics during a July 12 community meeting.

The numbers shown, however, seemed to demonstrate little to no consistent reduction in crowds gathering around the intersection’s open-air drug market and less than a quarter of those in the housing pipeline finding permanent residence.

Del Rio said that she wouldn’t be overly concerned unless the number of people at the intersection approached 200. Data the city has collected since June measuring the number of people present at the intersection between 5 and 8am showed an average of 122 people.

The number regularly approached 150, with a peak of 174 individuals. There was some variance day-to-day in the 29 headcounts, but little change from the preceding month. May had an average count of 123 people.

“My personal threshold, if we see the number creep up to almost 200 then we’ll start asking questions about what’s happening,” she said. “We do see some more people on weekends. I don’t think there are many takeaways here, but the city is doing these counts.”

The city’s counts started in mid-April, although they didn’t become regular occurrences until May. Del Rio said it’s “way too early to detect any patterns or have any conclusions.”

Despite the assurances, residents and stakeholders found plenty to be concerned about. Del Rio faced questioning over the city’s ability to remove persistent encampments, much of which she said was “not answered currently by the law department,” and whether the city’s current strategy was actually viable in the long term.

“There’s 180 people regularly there and we’re treating this as the new normal. ‘Oh, if it goes up to 200, we may have to do something.’ This isn’t right, this isn’t normal, it’s miserable to have 180 new people there. You’ve created a sanctuary for drug users from all over the state. We were told that once we get the people off the street they aren’t going to be replaced,” said George Stergios, vice president of the Worcester Square Area Neighborhood Association.

“The numbers have doubled. The issue has grown across the city. And the city is still giving us the same information we’ve been hearing for years,” said Domingos DaRosa. “Is there actual progress that you guys can present to us that’s different from what we heard six months ago? A year ago? Two years ago?”

Numbers presented for the city’s housing efforts aren’t much better. Statistics from Sheila Dillon, Boston’s chief of housing, show that only 43 individuals have been permanently housed out of the 175 people entered the city’s low-threshold Mass and Cass housing programs.

Some of those programs were supposed to be stopgap measures to keep people housed during winter months but are still proceeding with no end in sight. Dillon appealed to statistics on overall engagement, which showed 80% of people in transitional housing were in some capacity engaged with housing personnel to look for more permanent residences.

“Some of you might be saying, ‘so what?’ But a lot of these folks have not been engaged with services for a long period of time, so it’s really good that they trust someone enough to work with them,” she said.