AHCoin
Affordable Housing Coin — an earned path to a home, not a handout and not a loan.
"A rising tide lifts all boats." ↓ Where the phrase comes from
AHCoin is an affordable housing plan. You earn it, you don't buy it — through everyday actions that already support your community:
Buying products or services from people or companies
Donating items to certain thrift stores
Doing a work-study program
Sharing the AHCoin plan with businesses and others
Six Levels, Location-Dependent
AHCoin has six levels — the value or usefulness of your AHCoin depends on where you plan to live:
Bronze level might get you a tiny house in Seattle — or a full studio apartment in a smaller town, where housing costs less to begin with. Utilities and other expenses may still apply on top of your AHCoin level.
Higher levels unlock bigger dwellings. Choose to live smaller than your level allows, and you can take the difference back as cash — downsizing pays you, instead of costing you.
How AHCoin Works
- Non-Transferable
AHCoin has no cash value and generally can't be transferred to someone else.
- Founder Coin
The exception: "Founder" AHCoin, offered to help buy specific properties, is transferable — you can sell it.
- Governance
AHCoin holders vote for a building's Trustees while they're tenants. Trustees keep the building running. Each building is its own non-profit entity, with ownership safeguards built in.
- Eligibility
No age limit, no location limit. If you receive cash out of this program, it's reported as taxable income above the current $600 threshold.
- Terms
The AHCoin program's terms can be upgraded at any time as the plan develops.
Founder AHCoin is currently offered to help acquire buildings in Washington State and Oregon.
Get Founder AHCoin →"A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats"
The phrase is almost always credited to John F. Kennedy — he made it famous in a 1963 speech defending a dam project in Arkansas, saying, "As they say on my own Cape Cod, a rising tide lifts all the boats." But Kennedy didn't coin it. His speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, later revealed in his 2009 memoir Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History that he first came across the line while researching New England's economic problems during his earliest days working for then-Senator Kennedy in the 1950s. The line belonged to the New England Council, a regional chamber of commerce, which had already been using "The Rising Tide Lifts All The Boats" as its own slogan since 1950 — and even then, the Council described it as "an old New England saying."
The phrase is older still. The earliest known printed use traces to a January 1910 article in the Boston Evening Transcript, discussing Christian missionary work. Some historians trace the underlying image even further back — to a 1647 sermon by the English preacher William Bridge, delivered in Stepney, London, using the rising tide as a metaphor for shared blessing.
Worth knowing: the phrase has been used to argue for very different policies over the decades — Kennedy invoked it for public infrastructure investment, while Ronald Reagan later used the same line to defend supply-side tax cuts. Critics have pushed back on both, arguing the metaphor assumes everyone already has a seaworthy boat to be lifted — that a rising tide does little for someone whose boat is taking on water. AHCoin's own approach is closer to Kennedy's original economic-investment framing than Reagan's: the "tide" here is directed capital going specifically toward housing capacity, not a general hope that broad growth eventually trickles down to it.