The roommate situation

In the JAG episode "A Girl's Best Friend," Chegwidden gets to beat up a shady jeweler while Harm tries to get Coates to move in to a recently vacated apartment in his building so that Matty can move in there, too. Coates at first refuses, even though she's supposedly living with three other female Petty Officers in one cramped place.

I'm not sure there's a nit here, but the situation Coates is in certainly raises some plot credibility questions. Besides a ship (women couldn't serve on a submarine), where else would the Navy cram four women to a room? In the Marine Corps in real life I know that putting four female Lance Corporals in one room is infrequent but not unheard of. At that pay grade, to live at the barracks, you have to have a roommate, unless you wind up being the last odd one (e.g., the 25th woman in a unit with 25 enlisted women living on base). But generally Marines get put two to a room. If you make Sergeant, you most likely get your own room. It would probably take some kind of construction emergency for them to have to put you with a roommate. I don't know much about the Navy base housing situation, but I would imagine that a Petty Officer 2nd Class would have at most one roommate.

But this is all with the assumption that Coates is living on a base. I suppose it's possible that four female Petty Officers would rent a civilian apartment. Since I know next to nothing about real estate prices in Virginia, I'm not sure if that scenario is realistic. It could be. In the show, Coates is convinced to accept Harm's offer when he assures her that he will only pay Matty's half of the rent.