A large share of Inglewood housing is slab-on-grade. The slab, not the flooring you picked, is what decides whether the job lasts. This is what to test, what to prepare, and where the money actually goes.
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Much of Inglewood's post-war housing was built directly on a concrete slab poured on the ground, with no crawl space beneath. That single fact reshapes a flooring project. There is no joist bounce and no crawl-space ventilation to worry about, which is a genuine advantage. What replaces them is concrete's habit of carrying ground moisture up through itself as vapour, and of being slightly out of level almost everywhere. Both are fixable and both cost money, which is why two quotes for the same flooring on the same slab can differ by thousands without either being dishonest.
Concrete on grade is in permanent contact with damp soil. Whether that moisture reaches your floor depends on whether a vapour retarder was installed under the slab, which was not universal in older construction, and on drainage around the house. Vapour moving up through a slab is what lifts glued-down vinyl, delaminates engineered wood, and grows mould under an impermeable floor covering. It is invisible until it is expensive. Any competent installer will want a moisture test before quoting an adhesive or a wood product, and any who does not is transferring a risk onto you without telling you.
The two recognised methods are the relative humidity in-slab probe test, described by ASTM F2170, and the calcium chloride test for moisture vapour emission rate, described by ASTM F1869. The probe test measures humidity inside the slab and is generally the more reliable of the two on modern concrete. Every flooring manufacturer publishes a maximum figure their warranty depends on, and those figures differ by product. Taping a square of plastic to the floor overnight tells you only whether there is a very obvious problem; it is a rough screen, not a test result, and it will not satisfy a warranty claim. Ask for the numbers and the method in writing.
If the slab reads above what your chosen product allows, you have three routes. Choose a product with a higher tolerance, which is usually the cheapest answer. Install a moisture-mitigation system - typically an epoxy or similar coating applied to the prepared slab - which is effective and adds meaningful cost per square foot. Or use a floating floor with an integrated or separate vapour barrier, which handles moderate readings well at low cost. Drainage outside the house should be corrected in parallel, because slab moisture is very often a gutter, downspout or grade problem that a coating merely covers up.
Concrete slabs settle, and the original pour was rarely flat to the tolerance a rigid click-lock floor wants. Thin flooring telegraphs every dip. Rigid plank laid over a hollow flexes and the locking joints eventually separate, which is the most common cause of a click-lock floor failing early. Preparation means grinding high spots and filling low ones with a self-levelling compound. This is a real line item on a real quote and its absence from a cheap quote is the single most useful thing to notice. Ask what flatness tolerance the product specifies and how the slab will be brought to it.
Older slabs in this housing stock often carry glued-down material, sometimes in more than one layer, and sometimes adhesive that has been there for decades. Removal is slow, dusty work and is priced separately from installation. There is one caution worth stating plainly: floor tile and the black adhesive used with it in buildings of a certain age can contain asbestos, and disturbing it is regulated. If your home is old enough for that to be a possibility, the material should be tested before anyone grinds or scrapes it, and if it tests positive the removal belongs to a licensed abatement contractor, not to a flooring crew.
Tile is the natural fit: it goes down on concrete, tolerates moisture, and lasts. Luxury vinyl plank is the most common modern choice because it is waterproof, floats over a prepared slab, and handles minor imperfection better than rigid alternatives. Engineered wood works over a slab where moisture readings allow and the slab is flat, and it gives a real wood surface. Solid hardwood is the difficult one - it should not be nailed to a slab, so it needs a plywood subfloor built over the concrete, which adds cost and raises the floor height enough to affect doors and thresholds. Ask for the height build-up in inches before you commit.
Quotes on slab jobs are hard to compare because the preparation is where they differ. Ask every contractor to break out demolition and disposal, moisture testing with the method named, mitigation if required, grinding and levelling, underlayment, material, installation, transitions and thresholds, and baseboard or shoe moulding. Ask what the assumed condition of the slab is and what happens contractually if it is worse. A quote that is a single number per square foot is not a quote, it is a hope, and the difference will arrive as a change order once the old floor is up.
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