Passion Play

Don’t blink; don’t become distracted when Scott Ehrlich describes his plans to transform downtown Lancaster. A turn of the head and you’ll miss as Ehrlich points out the land he bought for a new city park. If your mind wanders you’ll miss as he explains why he chose a Santa Barbara Mission style for the Arbor Field residential building facing Sierra Highway. Ehrlich’s enthusiasm is such that the words cannot come quickly enough to tell of the changes coming to downtown Lancaster; how what is now a bare lot will become townhomes and how an empty former grocery store will become a restaurant with a bowling alley in the basement. Ask those who know and they will use ‘energetic’ to describe Ehrlich. Staff in the economic development department feed off the energy, becoming converts to his vision, one city employee said. Ehrlich has another word for it. “It’s passion,” he said. “I believe in it.” InSite Real Estate Development, Ehrlich’s Encino-based company, owns and manages residential properties throughout Southern California but it will be in the Antelope Valley where he will make his biggest mark. Downtown lacked high-density housing until Ehrlich began to build there. Few structures were above two stories, and now he’s building them four- and five-stories tall. It’s not just for the financial payback that Ehrlich spends his money and time on the Lancaster project. It may be partly for the ego boost of taking an under-utilized area of the city and injecting new life into it. Ehrlich admits to being a better copier than he is a creator. If he sees an architectural style that he likes, he uses it in his buildings. The Tuscan villa style of the Arbor Court senior housing in Lancaster is modeled after his home. The Mission style of Arbor Field copies the first home Ehrlich built. When it comes to downtown Lancaster, the name he invokes as his inspiration is developer Rick Caruso and the lifestyle centers he has built in Los Angeles, Glendale and elsewhere that have become gathering places for the communities they serve. Under Ehrlich’s vision a former retail building on Lancaster Boulevard will include an outdoor promenade for public art, concerts and the display of a large Christmas tree during the holidays. All this is done through a public-private partnership that is necessary to get such pricey projects completed. “They know the need for a downtown,” Ehrlich said of the city officials. “There is no Main Street in the Antelope Valley; there is no place to hang out.” Deputy City Manager Jason Caudle predicts success with making the city the artistic center of north Los Angeles. Caudle spent 10 years in Tehachapi during which the city started its own downtown redevelopment centered on what he called “the creative class.” Live shows take place at the renovated BeeKay Theater and a small cluster of art and antique shops also moved in. Ehrlich is the ideal developer to make a similar transformation in Lancaster. “That is the partner the city wants – someone who puts the combination of what is in their heart with what is in their pocket,” Caudle said. Lancaster Boulevard for years was a main commercial strip in the city until the Antelope Valley Freeway drew businesses away. The area, however, was not completely abandoned as it became the site of a new city hall, the Lancaster Performing Arts Center, a sheriff’s station and Los Angeles county library. The downtown specific plan adopted by the Lancaster City Council last year goes beyond just municipal uses for property there, dividing the 140-acre downtown area into seven distinct districts identified by their primary use commerce, transit, small offices, public parkways, the arts, and residential. With a projected build-out of 2030, the downtown would encompass nearly a million square feet each in retail and service space, and office and public space; and 3,500 residential units. Ehrlich plays the role of the linchpin; a guinea pig of sorts who tests the waters of what a developer can find success with. He’s mixing housing with retail, an art museum and gallery. What Erhlich playfully calls the “ugly brown building” at Lancaster Boulevard and Elm will become an incubator for start-up retail shops. “He’s looking at the whole picture of live, work and play and how each component is developed to support the other,” said Josh Mann, the director of the Antelope Valley Board Of Trade and president of Lancaster Old Town Site, a group of downtown business and property owners. An example of how Ehrlich brings those components together is at Arbor Court, senior housing in the converted Essex Hotel on the edge of downtown on 10th Street West. The hotel’s former gym has been made into an adult day health care facility with physical therapy rooms. An adjacent building has small storefronts for a beauty parlor, caf & #233;, pharmacy and the Antelope Valley Bridge Club. In the heart of downtown, Ehrlich wants to create that same synergy for a different demographic youthful artists living in a loft building with a caf & #233; on the ground floor and gallery next door. For it’s been the artistic types, Ehrlich said, who gravitate toward dilapidated areas with low rents and wide work space. Only later, after gentrification takes place, do the artists get priced out and move elsewhere. But that won’t happen in this case. The rents of the lofts will be priced from $300 to $900 a month. The living space will include large windows, special disposals for paint and an air circulation system to remove paint fumes. “This is stuff in this economy they will need,” Ehrlich said. Even more than the low rents and natural light, the attraction for a nascent Lancaster arts community is the chance to create a downtown for themselves. Residential neighborhoods are located on side streets off Lancaster Boulevard but the lofts will be the first housing right on the boulevard. Not even the stagnant economy can dampen Ehrlich’s enthusiasm for the downtown plans. He declares that the era of big spending has ended and it will now be back to basics, an attitude reflected in his choice to invest in a low-cost restaurant for the downtown. “I have the best job in the world,” Ehrlich said. “I get to design something and then build it.”