Back on the ground, Tillman, a graduate of Stanford’s business school, recognized that people still needed clean clothes, the age of satellites notwithstanding. 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. Robert Tillman, the owner of Lavanderia, a laundromat in San Francisco’s Mission District (Marc Vartabedian)īy the ’90s, the industry was strong enough to attract Tillman’s attention. 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. Technological leaps in washer and dryer efficiency during the ’80s allowed the industry to expand even more. “Like our mantra goes, ‘The more people, the more dirty clothes,’” Brian Wallace, the president of the Coin Laundry Association told me. 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. (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.Ĭollectively 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. 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). According to data from the Census Bureau, the number of laundry facilities in the U.S. That has posed a problem for laundromats. 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. “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. 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. Lavanderia is the only one Tillman has left, and he’d like to turn it into a 75-unit apartment building, with some units generating as much as $55,000 each year. Business was so bad at his nine other Bay Area laundromats that he sold them off over the years. But in the past decade, its owner, a wealthy tech entrepreneur named Robert Tillman, has seen revenues dry up. In its heyday, the 5,200-square-foot laundromat brought in over $1,000 a day in quarters. Years in the Mission District, the historically Latino neighborhood where Lavanderia, whose name means laundromat in Spanish, is located. How mRNA Technology Could Change the World Derek Thompson
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