As politicians across Boston debate tent clearing ordinances and states of emergency, other stakeholders are turning their attention to the flip side of homelessness. How to get people out of overnight shelters permanently.

The Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay (NABB) held its annual homelessness forum on September 27, an event that brings together private, public and civic constituencies to reflect on the state of shelter in Boston and what can be done to mitigate Boston’s spiraling housing costs.

There are some causes for concern in the numbers from Boston’s 2023 homeless census, which recorded a 42% jump in the number of homeless residents on the street, from 119 to 169.

Overall, however, the experts on NABB’s panel were still optimistic. Boston’s homelessness statistics remain dramatically better than most major cities both in flat volume and the proportion of people actually living in the street versus simply insecure in their housing.

Boston’s unsheltered have consistently made up around 3-4% of its homeless population. For comparison, cities struggling the most with homelessness like San Francisco can see unsheltered rates as high as 60%.

The Wu administration says its investigations have found only a handful of people at the Atkinson Street encampment staying there for shelter instead of its community or thriving drug market, requiring only around 30 beds to house them all if the tents come down.

The upshot of all this is that while Boston consistently places in the top ten in nationwide price rankings and housing instability isn’t going anywhere soon, eliminating street homelessness may actually be an achievable goal.

The forum’s focus was on this for most of its runtime. Expanding shelter space was actively resisted by speakers in favor of building more permanent supportive housing, subsidized units with wraparound services that let people move from overnight shelters into long-term rentals.

City officials have in recent months said they have enough shelter beds already to get everyone indoors, the system limited instead by a lack of long-term housing supply in the step after.

“We’re on track here to have less shelter in the hopes that housing reduces the demand for it over time. When we started this work around 80% of what we did every day was shelter, and 20% was housing. When we’re done, hopefully around 2026, 75% of what we do will be housing and 25% will be shelter. Boston is responding with a solution instead of short-term options,” said Lyndia Downie, the executive director of nonprofit Pine Street Inn.

“A bunch of studies compare groups that got supportive housing to those that didn’t. Some show huge savings for public health systems and emergency services,” said Ben Phillips, Senior Vice President of development for real estate firm Beacon Communities. “It’s obviously the right thing to do from a human perspective, but it’s also a pretty big economic benefit. It’s more efficient to provide people with the support they need to be independent than to deal with the consequences of allowing people to live on the street.”

The forum didn’t present any dramatic, sweeping solutions to expand housing supply. Speakers instead emphasized sustained effort from partnerships between developers and city government to incentivize new construction and ensure a larger portion of it is affordable or subsidized.

The government may be taking a more direct role in the near future. In recent weeks Mayor Michelle Wu and her staff have begun mentioning a completed audit of government property sitting idle, suggesting the city might partner directly with developers to build housing on over a hundred underutilized parcels as well as some large city parking lots.

“It’s been a tough few years with Covid, let’s face it, but we made it through. We’re starting to see the effects now of pandemic safety net stuff like the eviction moratorium going away,” said Sheila Dillon, the city’s chief of housing. “We’re up against it, but we can’t lose heart that we’ve made some progress either. We’ve got supportive housing in the pipeline. You don’t need more shelter beds if you’re moving people out every single night.”