If you live in the Hill District, you must go dancing monthly, listen to Black/Spanish radio, collect stamps and watch Black Entertainment Television. Live in ritzy Shadyside instead? Clearly you shop at Nordstrom, watch "Friends" in syndication, buy wireless phones and drive a Jaguar.

Maybe you're considering a move to Monroeville. Don't go if you don't like bowling, the "Jerry Springer Show" and eating at Hooters. And if handguns, painting and "Country Music TV" aren't your thing, you'll want to avoid venturing out to the country.

Whether valid or not, these thumbnail descriptions of various places are how national marketing companies often categorize millions of Americans, using demographic and other data broken down by ZIP codes. Developed and sold by San Diego-based marketing research firm Claritas Inc., retailers, builders, banks and other businesses use the information to determine where to locate stores and branches.

The only problem, according to study released last week by students at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, is that relying on such stereotypes is often the wrong way to look at neighborhoods. In partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Employment & Training Institute, Heinz students determined such an approach can work to keep businesses out of areas where they could potentially thrive.

Some city neighborhoods, for example, actually have more purchasing power -- money residents can spend after paying all the bills -- than Monroeville, the eastern suburb that along with neighbor Wilkins is a retail and dining mecca, the study concluded. It specifically cited the Hill District, which because of its higher residential density and thus population, spends more money per square mile than residents in Monroeville spend per square mile.

"Urban areas with high density are typically undervalued," said Sara Cheiffo, a Heinz student who worked on the report. While she and other students in the class did not call for the outright replacement of traditional market analysis, they concluded that more complete information is needed to understand what development will succeed in city neighborhoods.

Under traditional market analysis, businesses rely on data from such national market research firms as Claritas to determine the potentially most lucrative locations in a city or region. The marketing firms typically use U.S. Census data and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic's Consumer Expenditure Survey, which breaks down spending by households, to characterize neighborhoods.

Such assessments have drawn criticism for their racial and ethnic stereotypes. For example, a Brookings Institution report in 2001 found that residents in a predominately African-American neighborhood of Milwaukee were said to "buy video games, dine at fast food chicken restaurants, use non-prescription cough syrup, and use laundries and laundromats" in a Claritas marketing assessment. Another research firm, CACI International, said Milwaukee's Latinos "splurge on videos, long-distance phone calls, cable TV, theme parks and casino visits."

Claritas has since removed some of the more offensive verbiage in its thumbnail descriptions, though it has continued to lump residents of individual ZIP codes together under categories with such names as Young Digerati and Shotguns & Pickups. It also said it has dropped rankings that originally listed the 66 marketing segments in the order of most-to-least desirable.

A hierarchy still remains, however. Members of the No. 1 Claritas thumbnail, Upper Crust, are said to have a median household income of $107,923, spend $3,000 or more annually on foreign travel, contribute to PBS, read Architectural Digest magazine, watch "Wall Street Week" and drive a Lexus ES300. At the bottom is No. 66, Low-rise Living, which has a median income of $22,511, buys gospel music, shops at Footlocker, reads Ebony magazine, watches the "Steve Harvey Show" and drives a Mitsubishi Gallant.

Locally, the Hill District is characterized by Nos. 61 and 59, City Roots and Urban Elders, respectively. A description of City Roots states that "in these ethnically diverse neighborhoods -- more than a third are African-American and Hispanic -- residents are often widows and widowers living on fixed incomes and maintaining low-key lifestyles." Urban Elders are characterized as people who shop at Banana Republic and watch daytime TV.

Monroeville's thumbnails range from Nos. 15 to 45, and are characterized as Gray Power, Pools and Patios, and New Beginnings -- "singles and couples just starting out on their career paths, or starting over after recent divorces or company transfers." Residents in McKeesport, which also was contained in the CMU report, were considered Hometown Retired, Sunset City Blues, and Family Thrifts, the later being "young, ethnically diverse parents who have lots of children and work entry-level service jobs."

Resources used to determine these marketing thumbnails can be misleading, the Heinz study said. Data from the Census and the government's expenditure survey is more accurate for higher to middle income residents because of sampling bias, said Cheiffo, the Heinz student who worked on the report. A high percentage of low-income residents do not turn in their Census forms.

Accuracy also depends on whether you are looking at local or national data, she said. Localized information shows that income in the Hill District is 46 percent higher than the national data suggests. Moreover, she added, businesses should look beyond income and look more closely at expenditures to determine how and where consumers are spending their money.

"People spend in different proportions depending" on their earnings, she said. "But for food, there's not a high variance in what they spend." For example, food-at-home expenditures per capita were $1,619 in Monroeville and $1, 416 in the Hill District -- fairly similar figures for areas with such different income levels.

So the Heinz students worked with John Pawasarat at UW-Milwaukee to determine the purchasing power of Pittsburgh neighborhoods based on a methodology that looks at expenditure per square mile. "Companies look at median income, and that's what drives their methodology," said Pawasarat said. "We're saying forget this, show retailers the density of purchases in [an urban] neighborhood."

Under the new methodology that measures annual spending per square mile, food-at-home expenditures in the Hill District reach $12.15 million, or more than five times Monroeville's $2.4 million. As for retail spending per square mile, the Hill District is $2.4 million, vs. $700,000 in Monroeville. Census data, by comparison, only shows the median income for each locality, $14,536 for the Hill District vs. $46,108 in Monroeville, which could act to deter retailers from considering the Hill.

Other so-called "drill-down" studies using the University of Wisconsin's methodology could make a big difference in the way companies view urban neighborhoods in other cities. One study of Washington, D.C., indicated that the urban Columbia Heights/Petworth neighborhood had a 51 percent larger population than was indicated in Census data, and an aggregate income that was 70 percent higher. An analysis of Chicago's Marquette Park revealed that neighborhood was 90 percent larger in population than Census data estimated.

Pittsburgh policymakers want to take the study's findings a step further. The city's Urban Redevelopment Authority, which has been working to woo more businesses and a grocer to the Hill, plans to use the students' work to combat the negative perceptions spurred by marketing companies.

"This is a striking tool," said Julie Deseyn, senior project specialist for the URA. "It made a very clear case that we need to make more and better information available."

The URA will work with another group of Heinz school students in the fall to look at purchasing power in a few more Pittsburgh neighborhoods. The students also want to help publicize that national marketing companies don't necessarily present an accurate view of neighborhoods and that alternative methods can be useful.

"A lot of what we're facing is perception," said Irvin F. Williams, chief executive officer of Ebony Development, a Hill District development firm that's pushing to lure a supermarket. "African-Americans spend more money than any other ethnic group in consumable goods."