Your numbers are off. It's more $1550 than $2000. Which leads to a "required salary" of $55,800, by your own metric. Meanwhile, the average salary in Portland city itself is $69816. So things aren't bad like you think they are.

If you're less well off, you can live outside the city in Gresham or Hillsboro and take the MAX in to work, as I did for 6 years.

You also have no clue what it's like in other highly desirable cities.

Again though, rent only gets high because everybody wants to live here. That's a sign of a well functioning city, not the reverse.