what did New York do to lose five seats in 1980?

[freepcrusher]

I've just been astonished how you could lose that many seats. No other state has ever come close to losing that many in a single decade. You almost have to try hard to lose that many seats. The governors of that era (Rocky and Carey) were fairly popular.

I can see how areas like Buffalo would lose population since it's frigid and boring but most of the heavy underpopulated seats were in the NYC Metro. In New York City it isn't as cold as other parts of the northeast and there is stuff to do. The only severely underpopulated upstate district was the 37th (Nowak) which had 360,405 people per the 1980 census.

All the other underpopulated districts were in metro NY:

NY 12 (Chisholm) 320,886
NY 14 (Richmond) 364,356
NY 21 (Garcia) 233,787
NY 19 (Rangel) 371,614

[freepcrusher]

The 21st was the South Bronx district. What was its population in 1970?

The 1970 population was 462,073 so the population was basically cut in half during the 1970s.

[freepcrusher]

what's interesting is that even Nassau County lost population. Wasn't this an area of the postwar boom in home construction a la Levittown?