Who Truly Owns Your Florida Home? The Fight to Abolish Property Taxes

Welcome, Florida homeowners. I have a question for you: Who truly owns your home?

You paid the mortgage. You paid the insurance. You sign the deeds. But every single year, the government sends you a bill. A bill that, if you refuse to pay, results in one outcome: they take your home. That’s not ownership. That’s rent. Perpetual rent paid to the government. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis himself crystallized this sentiment: “Property taxes effectively require homeowners to pay rent to the government.” And he’s right.

But now, we have a shot, a single shot, in 2026 to end this injustice forever and make your home truly your own. This isn’t about a small tax cut or a temporary rebate. This is about Abolition. This is about HJR 201, the proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate property taxes on your home. The time for talk is over. The fight for true private property rights starts right now.

The Systemic Fraud of the Current Tax System

To understand the solution, you have to understand the unjust system we live under. It’s called the Save Our Homes (SOH) cap.

For long-time residents, the SOH cap limits your assessment increase to three percent a year. It sounds like protection, but it has created a massive, exploding tax penalty for anyone who bought their home recently. In a hot market like Tampa or Jacksonville, two identical homes side-by-side are paying wildly different amounts. The new buyer is literally subsidizing the property taxes of the long-term owner!

Florida's property taxes have skyrocketed 45 percent since 2019, and it’s the new buyer who shoulders the brunt of that burden as the assessed value resets to market price.

But the unfairness doesn't stop there. The system is engineered to perpetually grab revenue through the Recapture Rule. If your home’s market value drops, maybe because of a housing slowdown, the government can still raise your assessed value by up to three percent annually until it catches up to the market price. It’s a mechanism designed for continuous government growth, regardless of whether you have lost equity. This inherent inequity is why we need a complete systemic overhaul, not a tweak.

The $1.1 Billion Reason to Cut Off the Revenue Source

You can guarantee that when you threaten to cut off $43 billion in annual funding, there will be pushback. But the evidence against the current system is damning.

The state government is giving local counties and cities a choice: get fiscally responsible, or lose your tax authority entirely. Enter CFO Blaise Ingoglia and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE has been auditing local governments, and what they’ve found is a financial scandal.

Across just a handful of local jurisdictions, DOGE identified over $1.1 Billion in excessive and wasteful spending!

Where is YOUR money going instead of into fire stations or roads?

• Taxpayer-Funded Holograms: The City of Jacksonville spent $75,000 on a talking hologram of the Mayor.
• The Tree Counters: Orlando spent $460,000 since 2020 just to literally count the trees in their parks.
• The $7.5 Million Sidewalk: In Jacksonville, auditors flagged a single one-mile sidewalk project budgeted at $7.5 million, eight times the usual cost for that infrastructure!

This $1.1 Billion in waste is the moral and political justification for HJR 201. We have to eliminate local government’s primary source of revenue, the property tax, to force them to prioritize essential services and scrap the holograms and overpriced sidewalks.

The Political War Against Homeowners

The opposition's main tactic is FEAR: fear that your streets won't be safe and your schools will crumble. They claim the state is "overreaching" and trying to strip away "local control." The loudest voices in opposition are the local government establishment: the mayors, the county commissioners, and the city managers, who benefit from the massive, ever-increasing property tax revenue streams.

They argue that property taxes are the "stable, reliable" funding source for essential services. But when they say "stable and reliable," they mean "guaranteed and non-negotiable." This is a fight between The People and The Bureaucracy.

HJR 201: The Path to True Ownership

The plan is HJR 201, pushing for the complete elimination of all non-school property taxes on your primary residence. School funding will be offset with direct state revenue. The primary target for elimination is the county and municipal general fund millage, the money funding the bloated budgets and excessive spending.

If this passes in 2026, the SOH inequity ends, the "rent" ends, and you put thousands of dollars back in your family’s budget, permanently.

The Strategic Tax Swap Solution

The critics ask: "Where will the $43 Billion come from?" The strategic counter-proposals shift the burden away from property ownership and onto consumption and tourism.

The smart money solution being discussed includes:

1. Leveraging Tourists: Implement or increase tourist-focused fees, such as on hotel stays and theme park tickets. We are the vacation capital of the world; it’s time the world helped pay for our local services.
2. Real Estate Transaction Fees: Introduce a small fee on the sale of real estate, paid once when you sell, removing the continuous, annual "rent" model.
3. State Reserves: Use the state’s massive budget surpluses to backstop local services during the transition.

The Generational Wealth Payoff

When property tax is eliminated, the cost of homeownership drops by thousands of dollars annually. That is money that can now be invested, saved, or used to build equity faster. More importantly: when you pass your home down to your children, there is no reset of the assessed value because there is no assessed value! You eliminate the SOH penalty forever.

If Florida succeeds in this, we will be the first state in the nation to abolish property taxes.

This is the biggest fight for true private property rights and generational wealth. The time for apathy is over. You need to be informed and ready to VOTE YES in November 2026.