Linguists understand metaphors to be shortcuts to an individual's tacit knowledge about the world. As ethnographers and planners building a university-school partnership and seeking to understand residents' perceptions of their urban neighbourhood, attention to use of metaphor allowed us insight into an insider's mental model of who is in the community. In this article, we describe how, in our interview-based ethnographic needs assessment, one of our project participant's metaphors helped us discern the lived nature of social stratification as racialised economic inequality. This insight not only informs our partnership work but subverts some important assumptions about programme impact. Our experience suggests metaphor analysis contributes an important tool for ethnographic interpretation.