I am loathe to even write these up, since the back and forth on these applications is exhausting. From what I can glean, an applicant has to have a signed lease to apply for the lottery, so a landlord has to go into an arrangement with a tenant knowing that they likely won’t come back. As a result, landlords are making deals with multiple tenants; cannabis applicants are putting in applications for multiple locations; and it’s all a mess.

Case in point: Community Board 1 approved an applicant for 16 Murray in November; that person then also put in an application for 30 Warren. She’s long gone, and now CB1 has denied an application for that same address. Go figure.

Also the law states that a cannabis dispensary cannot be within 500 feet of a school, so why are applicants even allowed to apply at those locations??

So here are a couple I think could come to fruition:

378 BROADWAY AT WHITE
The applicant here was the retail operations manager for several dispensaries in Massachusetts in dispensaries — particularly in Cambridge. She said she will move to the city once she gets the license. CB1 denied her application because she provided no petitions of support to the community board for the proposed location and only provided public notice in English even though the building has a large monolinguistic Chinese language population.

161 HUDSON AT LAIGHT
I covered this one in December, and as far as I know, this applicant, X GreenLeaf LLC, was not approved by the state. CB1 denied it because it was within 500 feet of two schools; it does not have a handicap entrance, and the law says the entrance to these businesses must be at street level; and because the site on Hudson near the tunnel entrance will exacerbate the gridlock there.

16 MURRAY | BROADWAY & CHURCH
This one was approved by the committee, but I believe failed to pass at the full board. Blackmark LLC is a family business, run by a husband and wife and their nephew, who is a veteran and therefore able to get early access to the licensing process. They said they picked the location because of its proximity to the subway and because they think the dispensary will be a destination.

101 READE — MRIYA GALLERY
When the Ukrainian art gallery opened in this space, they intended to have a cannabis store in the basement. The new applicants are really interesting — they are a married couple and one man founded the largest cannabis lobbying group in the state, the Cannabis Association of New York, which represents 100 farmers and cultivators and helped the state create compliance program for that group. However, they are trapped in the same regulation that Mriya was — so I am not sure why they even applied. They are in 500 feet of Reade Street Prep, and though it didn’t come up, I would assume that’s true for My Little School as well.

The CB1 committee asked them to withdraw and come back with a new location, but they declined. They said that it is very hard to find locations that work so they are applying for three other licenses at the same time.