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.
What they said but also, that's the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Faced disastrous drop in land level back in the 1700s. Dunked the whole coast into the Pacific
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
we just went to that area yesterday!! its very rocky and lots of cliffs on the coast, and super super hilly and forested in the interior.
many absolutely do live there, and those municipalities marked on your map there are reasonably populated. but the terrain is not super great for building large stuff, and they really do not like deforestation either. it is also farther away from freeway I-5, where most stuff on the west coast is freighted by truck, and is more expensive, at least from our experiences.
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.
Why do you think almost no one lives there just because you don't know of a major city in the area?
It's simple logistics, there's no reason for a major city to be there.
You have Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria in the same region. And if anything is coming to the area it's going to that region already, and if it's going farther south you have better ports in Oregon.
Genuinely curious what made you interested in this idea or where it came from
This isn't an informed guess, but I'd imagine it has to do with ground suitability, as well as risks caused by the ocean and weather. I recently read an article that major cities in the area, away from the coast, are causing the ground to sink below their weight.
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.
One reason I haven't seen mentioned: it's hard to get there. The best you get is a two-lane highway (as in one lane for eastbound and one for westbound). Also because you have to go over a mountain range, there's actually very few highways to even use.
For the Oregon Coast, in that circle you have 4 highways: 6, 18, 26 and 30. If you want to go to, say, Newport you pretty much have to go to Lincoln City and then head South.
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.
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 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
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