Btw, I wouldn't necessarily use the entire bay area as your reference - as we weren't talking about the entire bay area either. Specifically only nicer neighborhoods. The price varies wildly by region. Apartments in south San Jose are much less expensive than in Palo Alto - but both are part of the bay area. There are many places in the bay area where my coworkers wouldn't even want to walk on the street - let alone live there... but there are cheaper housing options there.
You should be using ratios - not absolutes. If someone had $100,000/month rent then by your logic, they'd be just fine if they only had $2,000/month left over. That's very little buffer.
If you scale things up to that extent, then $2K becomes small compared to the possible variance in income or rent. But it's also small compared to the credit you'd have access to.
Without visiting I can't tell for sure, but I can compare apartments to what I'm used to by amenities, square footage, and such. If I had an offer and needed to move there, I'd judge the neighborhood by the housing, not vice versa.
My reference point would be, for a young single person in a "normal" area of the country, $55K and $1250/month rent means you have $2K/month left over. A lot of people don't make this much.
To have the same amount left over after taxes and rent of $2800/month, it appears you'd need to make about $78K. So anything above $80K seems on the face of it to be livable at least for one person.
By the way, I noticed that total income taxes seem to actually be lower than in upstate NY.