No Stupid Questions

A few reasons. One is there isn't much flat land; most of it is hilly and even mountainous and covered in thick forests. The flat areas are occupied with farms and towns but the space is small and not enough for big cities to grow. The hills and mountains are heavily forested and there has never been a big enough population to need to encroach on them. It's also not great for building and farming, unless grazing animals.

The other big reason is there are no natural deep sea ports in that region. It's either marshy or the estuary of the river Colombia. Small fishing towns would be fine, but not big industrial ports that drive city growth (or did in the past). Meanwhile, Portland sits further back up the river with plenty of flat land and access to the water, so makes a natural port. And Seattle sits on the bay further north and is coastal, and a good port.

The dynamic got set up of big cities further back, and those areas never really grew. Once the land became part of state forests, then that restricts growth even more.

EDIT: Here is a topographical map showing in blue the flat land: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/world/?center=38.54817%2C-119.79492&zoom=6

Because somebody put a giant red fence around the area, nobody can get in.

The Goonies: am I a joke to you?

NGL I’d move to Astoria in a heartbeat if I had a remote job and a place to land lined up, but the Epstein class has decided that can’t happen

Wildly wet. Tons of rain. Geographic reasons for it.

Other comments give a good tl;dw already, but in case anyone wants a video with pictures and examples, Geography By Geoff has done this topic a few times. Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqyM54CNSsY

Basically, that's not where the farmland is (or, when it was first being settled, the fur, which provided the major economic incentives for why that area was settled in the first place). You also have to think about how the land was settled. Settlers from the east used mountain valleys to get around. Mountain valleys in that circled area aren't easily traversable and don't go anywhere or lead anywhere useful. Settlers from the southwest used ships and followed shipping routes up the coast. When you consider both these settlement methods simultaneously (and they were in fact used almost simultaneously) you will come to the conclusion that these are some of the most remote areas to be settled in the continental US, and their relative remoteness has a lot to do with why they were settled the way they were.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of a ship sailing up the coast there are few good protected anchorages to use as a sheltered waystation or safe harbor in case of inclement weather directly along the coast, but if you go just a little further you'll reach good port lands (it's literally called "Portland") or Seattle and you might as well journey just a little further to stop there instead if you possibly can. When you consider people taking a long and perilous journey around the horn of South America (there was no Panama Canal) you're almost at the end of the line, and you aren't going to want to stop 99% of the way, you're so close that you'll push on to the end, and that's why Portland, Seattle and Vancouver developed where they did. The farmland got worse the further north you went and became increasingly unsustainable so nobody really went much further before the gold rush provided yet another economic incentive to draw people there, but that's a different story.

I'll add to all the maybe's by saying maybe Bigfoot.

Maybe too hilly or steep cliff coast ( = bad when you want fishing or an harbor)

Cold, wet, rocky.

The Northwest Sasquatch tick can grow to 6” in size and kill a person overnight.

Maybe the same reason there are so few ports on the African West Coast.

The Olympic Exclusion Zone is expanding

The harbor/bay at the north of that circle is Aberdeen and Hoquiam. It used to be a larger city and a major port, but with Seattle's development, the railroads from the east terminating at Puget Sound, and the boom of WW2 making the region a military base, it became overshadowed and neglected for the last 100 years.

There's a mountain separating House of Oregon oh well I'm old valley, which is the good agriculture land in the state. The city of Portland is located where the Willamette River reaches the Columbia river. The mouth of the Columbia, where Astoria is, is not navigable. The mouth of the Columbia river is famously called the graveyard of the Pacific because it's so treacherous to try and cross by boat. The coastal Oregon is hilly without natural ports

Not sure if this applies to the entire northwest coast but I had a friend from a small town in the northwest who said the water was colder and there were more sharks in those waters. So it wasn't like beachfront property where people would regularly go swimming.

Also like the other comment mentioned those areas also tend to be steeper, more cliffs, etc so I imagine developing property around there could get expensive, and that's ignoring if any of those areas are park / natural preserve areas.

There's lots of small chill beach towns, seems like a lovely place to live really. Been considering moving there actually 😆

They didn't know it when the states were formed, but I think a lot of the modern hesitancy comes from 'the big one' that we now know will certainly occur. I love visiting Newport - but you can't ignore the tsunami safety zone makers and evacuation route signage everywhere you look. There are plenty of houses and tons of space to build, but because these coastal towns are far away from the major hubs, no one is going to commute from there either, imho.

First, I've been to Astoria Oregon, and I assure you that people live there. It's not Vancouver, but it's a legit town.

But I get your question. I think the answers are complex and technical, but my understanding is that people migrate and settle, and then population centers often grow based on a mix of natural features and where human-made resources like centers of education are constructed. So it's really more of a question of why were the locations of Portland and Seattle better.

I'm not a geographer, so I don't know the precise features, but my guess is that Portland and Seattle were located in areas that offered most of the benefits of this coastal region in terms of access to the ocean but had greater benefits and fewer downsides. I'm just speculating here, but my first guess would be that the weather inland is less intense. It might also provide better access to freshwater and arable land.

But people do live there. And if you live in Newport or Lincoln City you're two hours from an international airport. That's not exactly undeveloped wilderness. People just chose to settle a bit more inland along bays, which considering how rough the weather in the coastal Pacific northwest can be, seems sensible.

Based on the voting districts alone, those areas aren't the least populated in the state, but they're also definitely not cities.

Since those areas also don't have hiking trails unlike a huge swath of the state, I'm going guess the terrain along the coast there is not easily traverseable.