Community leaders are up in arms over a proposal for financially ailing St. Vincent’s Hospital to be taken over by a major hospital system and turned into an outpatient-only center.

That’s understandable — over the past 160 years, St. Vincent’s has been a major halth-care facility for Greenwich Village, particularly for low-income and uninsured patients. Removing its capacity to take ambulance 911 calls will force patients to travel extra distances for emergency care.

But all the demands to “Save St. Vincent’s” ignore a very sobering reality: The hospital, vital though it is, simply can’t afford to keep operating in the face of $700 million in debt.

Moreover, St. Vincent’s continues to lose $5 million to $10 million a month. As the state Health Department concluded, the hospital “is not competitive within its market.”

St. Vincent’s had hoped to ease its financial woes — which led to a bankruptcy from which the hospital emerged in 2007 — via a $1.6 billion modernization project financed in part by the building of a residential condo tower.

Predictably, the preservationist community — led by the likes of actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins — erected one roadblock after another.

Last July, after nearly two years of tumult and obstructionism, the city Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to approve the project. But it still faced hurdles in the City Council and the Planning Commission — not to mention additional harassment suits from the preservationists.

As a result, building on the project — whose costs continued to soar with each new delay — was put off until the middle of 2012 at the earliest, far too late to bail out St. Vincent’s.

Continuum Health Partners, which owns Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, has now agreed to take over the hospital and assume its staggering debt.

Some local leaders are talking about a state and/or city bailout to save St. Vincent’s — but where will the cash come from for that?

The sad reality is that, absent a takeover, St. Vincent’s is headed into another bankruptcy — which may well have been avoided had the hospital been allowed to develop its valuable real estate.