A team of developers is turning a hotel near JFK Airport into more than 300 new apartments — putting the building on pace to become the city’s first such residential conversion under a stalled measure meant to spur affordable housing.

Developers Slate Property Group and the nonprofit RiseBoro Community Partnership are buying the Hilton hotel across from the airport and turning it into 318 permanent apartments. They’ll get significant financing through the state’s Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act, commonly known as HONDA — a program that grew out of the pandemic but lost steam as tourism began to rebound.

RiseBoro CEO Scott Short said he was happy they could “crack the code” on conversions after looking for suitable, cost-effective hotels for more than two years. Short said the hotel configuration and large lobby made it a prime candidate for conversion.

“This is a hotel with great bones [and] relatively large-sized hotel rooms compared to New York City standards,” he said. “We don’t want to create a bunch of shoebox-size apartments.”

Short said the conversion will cost about $150 million, including the roughly $70 million purchase price.

The developers will receive $48 million from the $200 million HONDA fund, along with additional subsidies from other city and state agencies. The plan was first reported by the New York Times.

More than half of the units will be reserved for people experiencing homelessness — a mandate under the HONDA program — while the rest will be reserved for low- and moderate-income households.

“We can solve the housing crisis,” Short said, adding that the Queens plan shows “we can create hundreds of units of new housing out of hotels and other underutilized assets.”

The funding source may be new, but the concept isn’t.

Developers of supportive and affordable housing have long turned temporary lodgings into permanent apartments, including recent conversions of a DUMBO hotel once owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and a dorm-style “single-room occupancy” hotel on the Upper West Side. A motel conversion is also underway in Ulster County.

The idea gained new traction as the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the tourism industry and left tens of thousands of hotel rooms vacant. Mayor Eric Adams made the conversions a priority on the campaign trail, calling for the transformation of 25,000 hotel rooms into affordable apartments.

But by the time state lawmakers enacted the initial HONDA fund to help finance residential conversions in 2021, tourism and hotel use had already begun to rebound, and owners were less willing to sell with a more lucrative future on the horizon.

The influential hotel workers union also resisted conversions, citing jobs for its members. Their opposition disrupted a deal between Breaking Ground, the city’s largest supportive housing provider, and the owners of the vacant Paramount Hotel in Times Square, City Limits first reported last year.

And the city’s use of commercial hotels to house asylum-seekers and a growing homeless population has also made it tough to find hotels at a discount, said Assemblymember Karines Reyes, who sponsored the HONDA legislation.

Reyes said the Queens plan is good news. The city is currently mired in a severe housing shortage, and both median rents and homelessness have reached record highs.

“It’s important to have the first one done,” Reyes said. “But I also know this is a small drop in the bucket when it comes to the amount of housing we have to build.”

Despite broad acknowledgement of the housing and affordability problems, lawmakers have failed to take meaningful action to address the ongoing crises.

In January, Gov. Kathy Hochul released robust plans to create 800,000 new homes statewide but ditched the proposals after encountering sharp opposition from suburbanites and their representatives in the Assembly and Senate.

Progressive lawmakers pushed for new tenant protections, while a coalition of renter, landlord and real estate groups advocated for a stronger rental assistance program. None of those measures made it into the recently enacted state budget.

“There is still a need for the building of more housing, but we have to address affordability in the state of New York,” Reyes said. “These are all things that have to happen in concert.”