I think this title is a bit sensationalist. It's true that a middle class Portuguese, with the extremely heavy income/property taxes we have to pay, will find it very difficult to live in Lisbon's or Porto's city center in a medium-upper apartment.
Lisbon (and even more Porto) do have an extensive metro line though, and you can rent/buy an apartment on the outskirts (although still served by metro line), even with the low liquid wages. But more than that, vast areas of the country are extremely deserted and housing is extremely cheap there (a similar house in the interior goes for about 20% of one in Lisbon/Porto).
Also, there's the problem of the government having destroyed most of the middle class to embezzle the metric of the "minimum wage". Constant mandates to increase the minimum wage (and very heavy taxes on anyone that earns more than that), make so that companies can't discriminate between good and bad workers. Most workers get paid almost the same, and as such, there's no point in trying to be a better worker.
I'm one of the "lucky ones" because I bring home about €2000/month. My company has a total cost with my salary after taxes and other state contributions of €3880/month.
Now, I know that you can have the argument that we get a lot of "free" services in return, but, sadly, no, we don't. Decades old mismanagement (governments use these "free" services to cater to their party members and get them nice administration positions for which they don't have any experience) and some outright corruption, destroyed the quality of most of these "free" services.
The SNS is in absolute shambles. Our mortality rate is the highest since 1913 (ok, you can attribute that COVID). Our infant mortality rate, the highest since 1982 (sorry, but you can't say this one is due to COVID). Now, what happened to cause this? 7 years ago, we got a center-left government into power, one of their first measures was to destroy a system where the hospitals were public, but the management was done by a private company - these hospitals had much better metrics for both costs and quality of service. They abolished that, and replaced the hospitals' administration by party members. This is the result.
Like it happened with the SNS, similar stuff happened in a lot of other areas. In the end, the government's answer is always the same: increase taxes - which strangulates the economy and destroys the middle class, and, funnily enough, transforms us all into people dependent on "government's money" and their subsidies - that ensures that they keep in power because nobody can imagine living without those "free" services with the low liquid wages we have.