SCHENECTADY — In March 2023, Schenectady’s first legal cannabis dispensary opened its doors on upper Union Street to much fanfare, with Upstate Canna Co. drawing lines stretching down the block for weeks after its opening.
But the initial excitement soon led to grumbling from nearby business owners and residents, who complained to the City Council about the crowds waiting to gain access to the city’s only legal cannabis shop.
Two years after the store’s opening — and after a total of six cannabis shops had opened in the city — the City Council adopted zoning restrictions in February 2025 for the site of future dispensaries, with a law put in place to ban cannabis shops from residential districts and limiting their location to manufacturing and warehousing districts; the C-4 downtown mixed-use district; the C-5 business district; and the C-3 waterfront mixed-use district, by special permit only.
The council also barred new cannabis shops from opening within 500 feet of schools and 200 feet of religious properties.
That zoning echoed restrictions put in place by the council in June 2024 to limit smoke and vape shops to business and manufacturing districts.
There are currently nine cannabis dispensaries operating in Schenectady, including storefronts in prime locations on State Street, Broadway and at Mohawk Harbor.
In 2024, the People’s Joint cannabis dispensary opened at 501 State St. in a prominent downtown locale near Proctors. The shop is situated in the C-4 district, which is a permitted district for cannabis shops under the 2025 zoning.
City Council member Doreen Ditoro, who pressed the council to adopt smoke-shop zoning in 2024, said she believes the vape-shop and cannabis-dispensary zoning has been effective, but said she wished the council had moved sooner to limit the location of cannabis shops.
“The council was right on top of it, but it just didn’t happen as quickly as we would have liked,” Ditoro said.
When the smoke shop zoning was enacted in 2024, the city had 39 registered smoke shops, in addition to stores that were operating illegally without city approval.
Ditoro said she believes the number of registered vape shops are down in the past two years. The city's Code Enforcement Department did not have an up-to-date list of the current slate of smoke shops in Schenectady, with Mayor Gary McCarthy noting that the department is still working to bring smoke shops that have opened illegally in the city into compliance with the 2024 zoning regulations.
“The overall compliance rate and product has improved dramatically over the last few years,” McCarthy said of vape shops in the city.
The vape shop zoning approved by the council decreed that a store in the city is a vape shop if 40% or more of its floor area is dedicated to selling cigarettes, vape pens and additional smoking paraphernalia.
“There are some [shops] in the city that still really need to be addressed, but overall I think it’s been a good thing,” Ditoro said.
In December 2021, with the council facing an end-of-year deadline to decide whether to opt out of the state’s new law to allow the sale of cannabis products, the council decided to allow the sale of cannabis, with former council members Marion Porterfield and John Polimeni opposing the sale of recreational cannabis.
The city is estimating $850,000 in revenue in 2026 from its cannabis excise tax, up from the $683,225 it collected in 2024.
Lines on upper Union Street outside Upstate Canna have long since evaporated with the additional competition in the city, with eight more dispensaries opening in the past three years.
Ditoro said the zoning put in place by the city last year could combine with the free market to weed out some of the dispensaries in the city.
“There were always lines [outside Upstate Canna] and now it’s just overkill,” she said of the city’s nine dispensaries.
Contact Ted Remsnyder at tremsnyder@dailygazette.net. Follow him on X at @TedRemsnyder.
