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
Well genius, all you had to do was look at the census and see that NY's population plunged in the 1970s. Not shocking at all
