Fernando Ferrer's Response to the Mayor's State of the City Address:

"Your view on the state of the city depends on where you look at it from. The city looks very different from a penthouse than it does from a two-family home in Bayside, or a walk-up in Flatbush.

We all want Wall Street to thrive, but we want our neighborhoods and the families who live there to flourish, too.

And in a city where so many working families are struggling to keep their heads above water, the mayor offers a myopic vision and misplaced priorities.

He is determined to spend hundreds of millions in tax dollars to build a stadium for a billionaire team owner, while our schools are overcrowded and too many working families can't find child care or after-school programs or housing they can afford.

It's time to address the affordability crisis in our city, grow our middle class, and renew the promise of New York for all New Yorkers."

Virginia Fields Response to Mayor's State of the City Address:

"This was an effective political speech, and I welcome the Mayor's decision to join us in many of our longstanding efforts to build a better city for all our residents. The real lives behind these issues have deserved attention for some time now and what we heard today was a re-election speech that spelled out the Mayor's vision.

I am concerned, however, that the Mayor's new focus on these issues will suffer from his standard process of insular governance. We need governance that includes all of the people, and we simply haven't seen that up to this point.

Voters are looking for results. We have heard about the efforts to reform education, now we will look at the results of those reforms. We know about the 50 percent unemployment rate for African American males in New York; now we need to know what is being done to reduce those numbers? [sic] We have heard the plans for tens of thousands of new units of housing, now we need to see these units being built.

I am glad the mayor has decided to pursue an issue that I have been advocating for a long time in city government - expanding the participation of minority owned businesses in huge projects like the Westside and Lower Manhattan. We now hope to see results in this area so more New Yorkers can benefit from economic opportunities in our own city."

Charles Barron's Response to the Mayor's State of the City Address:

"I was trying to find out what city he was talking about. He painted such a rosy picture. This was a campaign speech, not an evaluation of what is really happening in the city. He doesn't mention that 50 percent of black males are unemployed. Complaints against the Police Department are up in my neighborhood.

He has turned New York City into New York City Inc., a playground for rich developers - Nets, Jets, and the Olympics - that is not trickling down into neighborhoods like East New York, where there is double-digit unemployment."

Steven Shaw's Response to the Mayor's State of the City Address:

"Due to Mayor Bloomberg's tax-and-spend policies, over the last two and one-half years, New York City has lost more private-sector jobs than it has created. He seeks increases in the welfare state... rather than focus on ways to get people out of these programs.

He sees stadiums as top priorities, but I guarantee you not one in 100 New Yorkers would consider publicly financed sports stadiums top priorities of theirs. New York needs to move in a different direction, which today's speech made even more apparent."