Apparently Abandoned ‘Maternity Hotel’ in Southern California Would Make a Great American Horror Story Set Piece

The alleged maternity hotel looming like Castle Frankenstein over the wary villagers in Chino Hills has been apparently abandoned, and all the grumpy neighbors who protested its defiant existence back in early December were all, “It’s about goddamn time.”

The Los Angeles Times reports that the suspected materntiy hotel, which was located in a seven-bedroom mansion that had been re-outfitted into a 17 bedroom, 17 bathroom mansion, was vacated after Chino Hill officials obtained a temporary restraining order against its owners. The mansion was thought to house women from China who traveled to the U.S. in order to give birth and thereby give their newborns the gift of dual citizenship so that they could one day return to America easily and go to a respected American institution of higher learning, like DeVry or Harvard. Although this sort of maternity tourism (which the Times explains is quite trendy in the San Gabriel Valley) doesn’t violate any federal laws, so-called maternity hotels often violate city ordinances and clash with neighborhood associations who’d rather not have busloads of pregnant Chinese women taking star tour field trips and pouring sewage all over the neighborhood. Speaking of which…

Neighbors living around the Chino Hills mansion complained of an incident back in September when the building’s septic tank overloaded and 2,000 gallons of raw sewage came a’ tumblin’ down the hill. City officials tasked with inspecting the alleged birthing compound came across oodles of dangers, like exposed wiring, missing smoke detectors, and holes in the floors. They also found some awfully incriminating brochures titled “USA Los Angeles Hermas International Club Guidance on How to Have an American Baby,” and spoke to one woman who claimed to have paid $150 per day for her room (another woman’s receipt totaled $27,000).

Now that the mansion seems unoccupied, neighbors aren’t so much thankful that their local bureaucracy was finally able to hogtie a shitty resident with red tape as they are grumpy that the ordeal lasted for so long, and still just slightly xenophobic-sounding when they talk about how ‘Merican colleges are only for ‘Mericans.