Matt Rize
Hashmaster
In terms of bay area bud, the idea that Oakland is the grow capital is lol. Oakland grows just as much bud and it's just as good as every other bay town/city. Oakland as the weed epicenter of bay area is just a marketing gimmick. 10x more bud is sold in San Francisco than Oakland.
When you talk about Humboldt bud and bay area bud you're talking about two different things entirely. Most Humboldt bud is outdoor organics. Most bay area bud is hydro. Good and bad bud come from both places.
I spend a lot of time up in Humboldt and in the bay area. At one time Humboldt had a significant quality advantage, but now not so much. All the old Humboldt strains are now all over northern California. On the average I think bay area bud is actually slightly better, but humboldt buds are way cheaper.
The one thing humboldt does have is really good indoor organics, but that's a very small % of the bud coming from there. The problem with humboldt outdoor is they get a lot of rain around harvest time and unless their shit is in a greenhouse all that outdoor bud gets mold if they don't harvest early.
Basically, humboldt had a significant advantage due to superior genetics for a long time, but that advantage has pretty much evaporated. Since most bay area weed is just humboldt genetics grown in an indoor climate controlled environment, it usually ends up better than most of the weather dependent humboldt bud.
On the average, I'll take bay area bud over humboldt bud any day.
Oh, and to answer the OPs original question;
The correct answer to that question is Sebastopol or Santa Cruz.
This guy knows what's up. I brought some really good indoor organics up to humboldt, and they were all like "whoa! that is way better than this outdoor". But they have literally tons of outdoor organics. Seb-town is cool if you are into hippy shit, decent food, hot hippy women, and high rent. It is totally a grower/hot milf town. Peace in medz is there and sebastopol will surely have "fair" local regulation in place once 19 passes (51% yes 41% no as of late). Outdoor rip offs are extremely common, as everyone knows what goes on there, and groups of high school guys go from yard to yard in the fall, so get a pitbull
