post processing - How do I get this "Washed out" effect for street photography?

I was browsing an unrelated question here and noticed this photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sparth/5730541580/lightbox/

I've seen countless street-photography shots with this kind of color effect / exposure. At best guess it looks like the white balance was warmed a bit, blacks were dialed up and saturation was dialed down.

I haven't been able to do a similar effect though, I'm curious If I am missing something obvious here, this is a common visual style I see in many places and I'm interested in something similar for some of my photos.

Update:

Thanks for the answer ElendilTheTall, I took a quick sample shot and tried this out on it. It wasn't the ideal shot for the effect, but I was able to apply the effect for the most part, some tweaking in the future on the shots I would like to do this on should render some cool results:

Original:

Processed:

Answer

These desaturated shots seem to be growing in popularity. This one appears to have been tinted slightly with a sepia tone.

If you have Photoshop, open the photo you want to use. Duplicate the background layer and set its Blending Mode to Multiply. The image will darken. Make a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and drop the saturation to 0. Set the opacity of this layer to about 40% - experiment with this. Finally make a new Levels or Curves layer above all the others, and use it to bring the brightness of the image to a normal level. Add a Photo Filter layer set to Sepia to add that brownish tint.