From his day job during the 1960's, my Iranian immigrant landlord in the 1970's had apparently been able to save and earn enough money to buy his house in Jamaica, Queens and obtain a mortgage loan from a New York City bank. And he had apparently then turned some of his house's extra rooms and its basement into separate/divided-up residential units; which he then rented to tenants, while he lived in a separated section of his house and continued to earn money from his day job.
Aside from Barry and me, most of the Iranian immigrant landlord's then tenants seemed to be single, apolitical Iranian men in their 20's who had come to the U.S.A. to be foreign students in local New York City colleges. Barry's previous roommate, for example, was an apolitical, secular, good-natured Iranian guy in his late 20's, who dressed tweedishly, and who had first come to the U.S.A. on some kind of foreign student visa. He had been renting the basement apartment with another Iranian student who moved out, prior to agreeing to let Barry move in and rent/share the basement apartment as his new roommate.
The reason Barry had needed to find a new roommate before I moved in with him was because this previous roommate was now moving out in order to live with his U.S.-born and raised American womanfriend--a middle-class, culturally straight white woman in her 20's, who was probably also considered physically attractive by most culturally straight U.S.-born men--in her much more modern Village area apartment in Downtown Manhattan.
