Flushing Airport housing plan will sink College Point

Locals aren’t clearing this plan for takeoff.

College Point residents are fuming over the city’s plan to build 3,000 new homes on the long-abandoned Flushing Airport — which they argue will sink the over-congested peninsula.

“Our streets aren’t built for it, our schools aren’t ready for it, our public transportation system isn’t ready for it … Now we’re hearing that our sewer plant can’t even handle what’s currently coming through,” Jennifer Shannon, president of the neighborhood civic, told The Post.

“Our whole community is so completely overcrowded. We just don’t have the ability to take on 10,000 more people.”

Mayor Adams announced Monday a plan to transform the 80-acre site off Flushing Bay, which has sat defunct and closed to the public since it was shuttered in 1984.

But locals argue the city is already behind on upgrading the community to accommodate the existing residents, leaving little to no room to take in new neighbors.

Less than 400 middle schoolers are able to attend College Point’s only middle school, with the rest needing to be bussed out to neighboring Flushing and Whitestone, while developers are still in the process of building the nabe’s very first high school, Shannon pointed out.

Much like the rest of the city, the Tallman Island sewer plant is routinely overwhelmed and regularly gushes raw wastewater into Flushing Bay during rainfall.

Residents have also been asking for at least a decade for the NYPD to establish a second police precinct — a satellite was opened last year to aid the overstretched 109th, but locals say the 66-officer team can’t keep up with rising crime.

“But let’s just keep putting more people into College Point! To me, it’s just not logical. Poor planning,” said Shannon.

The housing plan could also very well sink the flooding-prone neighborhood, literally and figuratively.

Over the last four decades, Flushing Airport has been almost completely reclaimed by the wetlands it sits on and serves as a “natural sponge” that helps retain and absorb excess water, according to Kat Cervino, president of the Coastal Preservation Network.

“This wetland is still connected to Mill Creek, which feeds into the Flushing Bay. Even though many parts of it are not visible, Mill Creek continues to be a very active tributary of Flushing Creek. And when you go anywhere around College Point in the area of that airport or the police academy, you see the roadways are collapsing and very hilly. You see foundations separating from buildings and it’s because of water infiltration,” Cervino explained, adding that paving over the wetlands would mitigate the wetlands’ ability to serve as a “natural sink” for water.

Cervino and other College Point stakeholders were invited on a walkthrough of the old airport with the EDC back in January when developer proposals were first being accepted, during which time the neighbors reiterated their hopes that the wetlands would be kept natural — ideally similar to the 655-acre refuge of Alley Pond Park.

Since then, the city has dropped communication with the locals, who feel abandoned over the possibility of dollar signs.

“People knew that the city definitely wants it to be a moneymaker, but from my perspective, how do you think of a quote-unquote monkeymaking for a property?” Cervino said.

“Is it simply what you can develop to satisfy, you know, this housing need, or is it something that’s going to save you money in the long run by helping to increase our capacity to weather these increasingly vicious storms? We’re looking at a pot of gold of stormwater retention in our own backyard!”