The erosion of Tillman’s laundromat business is a side effect of a national trend: Developers are remaking urban neighborhoods across the country, constructing apartment buildings for waves of young, wealthy workers and installing washers and dryers in each unit, leaving local laundromats without clientele. “Offering a washer and dryer in-unit is a trend we’re certainly seeing,” says Paula Munger, the director of industry research for the National Apartment Association. A recent survey by the industry group found the addition of washers and dryers to be one of the most common upgrades to apartments in recent years.

That has posed a problem for laundromats. According to data from the Census Bureau, the number of laundry facilities in the U.S. has declined by almost 20 percent since 2005, with especially precipitous drops in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles (17 percent) and Chicago (23 percent). (While that data includes both laundromats and dry cleaners, laundromats account for the bulk of the drop.) In the disappearance of laundromats, a longtime staple of urban living, one can detect yet another way that cities have changed in response to an influx of higher-earning residents.

Collectively earning $5 billion each year, as estimated by the Coin Laundry Association, the U.S.’s coin-operated laundromats are overwhelmingly mom-and-pop operations and share a tightly knit history with the American city. While the first self-serve laundromat opened in 1934 in Fort Worth, Texas, the industry didn’t really take off until the ’50s, after many cities became more densely populated. “Like our mantra goes, ‘The more people, the more dirty clothes,’” Brian Wallace, the president of the Coin Laundry Association told me. Technological leaps in washer and dryer efficiency during the ’80s allowed the industry to expand even more. Laundromats, communal spaces that brought people together to perform a mundane chore, became a fixture of the urban experience, with Hollywood using them to stage serendipitous meetings, as it did in the 1985 film The Laundromat.

By the ’90s, the industry was strong enough to attract Tillman’s attention. Tillman, who’s now 61, earned his first fortune from tech ventures—among other things, he was behind DigitalGlobe, a satellite-imaging company that has supplied orbital views of earth to Google and the U.S. government. Back on the ground, Tillman, a graduate of Stanford’s business school, recognized that people still needed clean clothes, the age of satellites notwithstanding. Soon, he came to own 18 laundromats. “The ’90s were a great time for the laundry business,” Tillman recalls.

After the dot-com bubble burst, San Francisco’s rapid inflow of wealth has hurt his businesses. Lavanderia’s revenue has slid 33 percent since 2004, according to the business’s accounting records. Terry Smith, who repairs machines and collects the quarters at Lavanderia and other Bay Area laundromats, anecdotally reports that lately he’s been dumping fewer coins into his jingling collections sack as he makes his rounds. Even Tillman’s eight laundromats in Albuquerque were impacted by the urban transformations seen across the country. “I saw where the business was headed,” Tillman says. By 2007, he sold off all his laundromats except for Lavanderia—part of a 15-percent drop in the number of the Bay Area’s laundry facilities since the early 2000s, according to Census Bureau data.