Soaring Land Values Spur Elks to Sell Their Lodges : Real estate: Chapters of the fraternal organization are getting millions for old properties, allowing them to build spiffier digs.

Around the Los Angeles area, the Elks are migrating.

Property the fraternal organization owns in Pasadena and Long Beach is for sale, and the group has already sold its Huntington Beach lodge.

The reason: Land in Southern California is fetching such high prices that Elks chapters that have been around a few years find themselves sitting on gold mines.

In Huntington Beach, for instance, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks got about $5 million for four acres next to the San Diego Freeway. That’s enough money to burn the mortgage on the old place, build a nicer clubhouse a few miles away and still leave a tidy balance in the bank.

In Pasadena, the Elks are asking about $11 million for a three-acre parking lot where the TV camera crews set up each year to shoot the Rose Parade. The buyer wants to build a hotel and the Elks want the money to spruce up the lodge, which opened in 1911.

There’s a good reason why the Elks want spiffier clubhouses: Most Southern California lodges are losing members at a time when it’s a lot hipper to do your own thing than be a joiner. A nicer clubhouse, the Elks reason, might bring some of those people back.

“Elks clubs in small towns have big memberships because it’s the only thing in town,” says Bob Cooley, secretary of the Huntington Beach lodge. “In the cities there are a lot of things competing for people’s time.”

The Pasadena lodge, for instance, had 2,000 members 10 years ago; now it has 1,400. In Long Beach 30 years ago there were nearly 10,000 Elks; now there are 2,800. And in Huntington Beach there were nearly a thousand Elks in the early 1980s; today, 800.

When the Elks bought the Huntington Beach lodge in 1971, owning 700 feet along the San Diego Freeway in northern Orange County was not that big a deal. Now it’s a hot location for an office building or stores, says the new owner, Newport Beach developer Burnham USA Equities. Burnham says it will tear down the old lodge, which is actually in Fountain Valley.

In Pasadena, the Elks have been talking for a couple of years to a developer they won’t identify. The talks were progressing nicely, according to the Elks, when Pasadena passed a slow-growth ordinance last year that nearly scared off the buyer. Even if he manages to evade the ordinance, which allows developers to build no more than 250,000 square feet of commercial space each year, Pasadena’s zoning laws are tough too.

But the property may be worth the trouble. Near the Los Angeles city line, in an affluent neighborhood on Pasadena’s west side, the parking lot is at the corner of two major streets. There’s a freeway ramp nearby, as well as the Norton Simon Museum and rows of upscale condos and apartments along the tree-lined streets.

But the membership trend may be inevitable. The new Huntington Beach club will be only about three-quarters the size of the old one.

In Long Beach, the Elks are selling a lodge and 2.5 acres near the airport for $4 million. The new clubhouse will be only half the size of the old one.