I spent a bit of time this afternoon photographing 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. For those of you who aren’t familiar, 1111 is a parking garage that’s so well designed that people throw events – like weddings – in it. It was designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron.

I’ve been through the building before, but one thing I missed the last time around was the 5th floor retail space pictured above. Conventional wisdom would tell you that upper level retail doesn’t really work all that well. But here you have a boutique shop with nothing around it besides parking stalls.

What makes this case different? Is it the architecture? The desirability of this particular structure? Or is it that the store has enough of a following that it can draw people up and into it?

I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that I took a gnarly spill yesterday afternoon on the mountains. The nose of my snowboard got stuck in deep snow and I fell forward onto my shoulder and then compressed my back. I tore a shoulder ligament and possibly fractured two ribs. So snowboarding season is over for me this year.

The good news is that I now have more time to relax and enjoy the town of Banff, and then Revelstoke this weekend.

Banff is a beautiful town. It’s compact, walkable, and surrounded by snow capped mountains. How could you not love it?

One of the more subtle things that stands out for me though is the ubiquity of second level retail and restaurants. There’s a lot people in the (North American) real estate industry that will tell you that second floor retail just doesn’t work (you want ground floor). And indeed, it can be hard to pull off. As I’ve said before, getting retail right in general can be difficult.

But in Banff, many of the bars and restaurants are up top. Here are a few examples (there’s an Earls, Boston Pizza, and a Korean restaurant, respectively):

So why does it work here?

Given the town’s small footprint and location within Banff National Park, the market is supply constrained. That’s why Parks Canada imposes a number of restrictions on residency. They’re trying to ensure that the people who actually work in the community can find housing and it all doesn’t become second homes.

So my gut tells me that in order to get enough retail/commercial space to serve the area and its tourists, they had no choice but to go up. They simply ran out of ground floor space. Because if the town was able to instead sprawl outward, I suspect that’s exactly what it would have done. And then more ground floor space would have been created.

To be fair, most of the second floor examples I came across were bars and restaurants, which is arguably easier to pull off than straight retail. But it’s still something. 

If any of you are familiar with real estate and planning in Banff or just have a better hypothesis, I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.

Though it’s sometimes common to downplay “this for that” startups (that is, derivative startups that try and borrow a model and use it in another market), Storefront–which can be described as Airbnb for retail spaces–has just raised a $7.3 million Series A round.

Storefront is a marketplace for short term retail space (think pop-up shops). People with space simply create a listing and decide how much they would like to charge per day, per week or per month. In doing so, Storefront “helps all sorts of brands, sellers, and merchants to create their first brick and mortar retail experience.”

What I find interesting about Storefront, and other startups like Airbnb, is that they’re really rewriting the way real estate marketplaces work. Instead of large retail landlords (Storefront) and multinational hotel operators (Airbnb), technology is allowing individuals to now participate in these marketplaces. Supply is being decentralized and anyone with extra space can participate.

You could argue that these sorts of informal and short term rentals are nothing new, but I don’t think there’s ever been the possibility of scaling up like there is today. I mean, just look at how much attention Airbnb has been getting in New York. These startups are having an impact on the way the larger market functions.

Change is coming. And I think we’ll see a lot more of it in the real estate space.