Many might be unaware that Crabgrass has a statistical mechanical link to epidemic spreads, but it does. This screenshot from the item in the statistical literature having the same title as this post:
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In the first post to this blog, summer of 2006 when the blog was founded, this was an explanation of the blog's title:
FIRST EVER CRABGRASS POST
Why insult crabgrass?
Well, so "Developers are Crabgrass." What's that mean to you? To me: Crabgrass will survive almost anything and prosper, unless you use chemical poisons and that could harm God's useful creatures. So far the analogy holds.
However, take a profit away, and that will not deter crabgrass one bit. But find a developer where there's no profit to be taken, and you've found a truly rare variant. Most likely an ex-developer.
A developer will take pride in finding raw land, getting a better view of the sky by removing every tree possible, and then harming that good view by putting up something using lumber differently than a tree does, and looking ugly. [...] It is ugly and it is brought to you by eager developers. Not one but a hierarchy of people with bad ideas and the will to reduce them all to unappealing housing. Developers subpurchasing from other developers, all ostensibly under the control of a city council, or vice versa. Go look at what's on the ground and tell me which way you see the control flowing. Either way, Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum in the driver's seat, good judgment is like a lost orphan after the circus has been to town. We know where it is absent, where it likely disappeared to, and likely motives for the disappearnace.
The Sixth Crabgrass post added:
Growth -- and The Myth of More Rooftops
Ramsey, Anoka County, Minnesota, is experiencing something we associate with crabgrass.
Growth.
Ill-regulated disturbing weed-like growth. Some say we need more rooftops to have a bigger tax base but you start with those rooftops and there's a tax when you have put people under them, but once you do that you find those folks strangely unwilling to pay taxes without - get the audacity of this - without expecting something helping them for their money.
The mantra is we want more for ourselves so we kickstart things with more new rooftops, built where the green-acres low taxed raw land stood, for that magical promised nirvana, collecting magic taxes without having to provide any services in return.
And then the thing gets bollexed up by these uppidy new occupants who come along and dash the plan with the notion that for some previously unforeseen reason, they do not want to be shorn sheep.
"But the developers all promised and the city councilmembers all promised you would enjoy getting a bit more air in the hot summers and would not mind the shears at all." Not so, they reply, a bit of huff to the voice.
The developers have gotten their money, and are like a deer that's heard gunfire - and the city officials are saying, "The plan's only half done. You have to spend money to make money. The remainder of the rooftops are in the works."
[...] General funds are tax income to a city, pooled into larger and larger pools annually, as sure as rain falling down and not up they grow larger. Yet, somehow the equation always works that you pay tax and you get promises and the money goes to crabgrass.
[...] If you do not fight a haphazard infiltration, the whole lawn will be crabgrass.
In mind then, development in the town where I live, suggesting it akin to an epidemic. And now I discover it is well grounded in the statistics literature.
The viewpoint has mellowed somewhat, while attention beyond the local town has grown. There is now a Coborns market locally. Not the largest in the chain, but with a suburban sized parking lot and not a crowded urban parking nightmare.
But, BOTTOM LINE, the genesis of the blog is in the title, with the notion that exurban growth can be an epidemic ruin of the "lawn," if developers are not cabined, cribbed, confined; to be better than their instincts would lead them.
So a citizen speaks out, whether heard or not, and from there the blog grew like crabgrass. But that was a later realization. The beat goes on. Ill-regulated growth will hold sway. There is a relation to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy always in total increasing.