What Living Quarters Are On Your Fictional Space Station?

One of the biggest things people worry about when they travel or move to a new place is where they’ll stay when they get there. Creating a fictional space station is no different: possibly one of the most important facts that will come out in your story is the living quarters your characters live in. Do they live in a small single person quarters or share a slightly bigger space with a roommate or two? Do they share a bedroom with their siblings or do children get separate rooms from siblings and parents? Do they live in a room similar to military barracks or are their quarters closer to a penthouse?
How does the station distribute quarters? Is it similar to a hotel where the station gets paid by the day or is it more like an apartment building where rent can come by the month? Does your station even collect rent on the quarters or is it a first come, first served mentality. Does your station house permanent residents or merely have crew come and go every few years? Many stations, such as Star Trek Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5 in their television series, have quarters set aside for the crewmembers stationed there for a few years and rent out the other quarters to guests or merchants as they pass through.
Another question to ask is how your station deals with other species. Taking the previously mentioned television series DS9 only seems to have species that breathe air similar to Earth atmosphere and the individual rooms have the ability to change their own air if desired. Babylon 5 has areas in a section called the alien sector that have different atmospheres for different aliens and humans have to wear gas masks to enter the sector. Those are two ways to deal with the question of what air other species may breathe. However you decide to adapt to your aliens or have them adapt to humans, remember to be consistent. There are readers that will pick up on things such as that a low oxygen environment doesn’t affect a character it should affect or that a character isn’t wearing a mask when it should be.