The Property-Tax Revolution

The United States is in the throes of the largest tax revolt in a generation, and the revolutionaries are winning.

Since 2020, nationwide home values have climbed roughly 50 percent, leading property-tax bills to increase 19 percent and contributing to a 71 percent increase in the cost of homeowner’s insurance.

At the same time, the price of gas, utilities, food, and everything else has risen, stamping out entrepreneurship, dimming the fertility rate, and making even six-figure earners feel financially strained.

Homeowners have had enough, and grassroots groups have mobilized to turn private kvetching into public policy.

Over the past four years, nearly two dozen states have slashed property taxes: Alabama by capping annual assessment increases, Colorado by lowering marginal rates, Indiana by creating credits, Nebraska by setting a limit on local collections, New York by sending checks to homeowners, Wyoming by carving out loopholes for seniors.

My back-of-the-envelope accounting suggests that the measures have reduced property-tax revenue in those states by 7 percent, saving homeowners as much as $45 billion a year.

This November, voters will consider a spate of similar proposals , the most radical one coming from legislators in Tallahassee, Florida.

Amendment 3, popularly known as “Save Our Homes,” would raise the “homestead” exemption on owner-occupied properties in the state from $50,000 to $250,000, meaning a couple with a condo with an assessed value of $400,000 would pay their county’s property-tax rate on $150,000 of their home’s value, rather than on $350,000.

The amendment would eliminate levies on more than half of dwellings .

In time, Florida legislators want to phase out property taxes on owner-occupied homes entirely.

Amendment 3 would give property owners a giant tax cut: $12 billion a year by one estimate.

It would ease the local cost-of-living crisis too, its proponents argue.

“Affordability is a problem for all Floridians,” Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman and the front-runner in the governor’s race, said on the stump last month .

“It doesn’t matter what your politics are.