Do You Really Own Your Home? A Tax Revolt Says No.

HARTVILLE, Ohio — A rebellion sweeping the nation gathered adherents in the parking lot outside northeast Ohio’s largest flea market on the Saturday before Memorial Day. Before making their way to stalls selling whirligigs, handmade soap, and peanut-butter Buckeye brownies, dozens of people stopped at folding tables where volunteers hawked petitions to abolish property taxes. Few needed much convincing before adding their names.

“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident wearing a Cleveland Browns coat to fend off the damp chill. “Why would I pay property tax?”

Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question. Fueled by the rising cost of homeownership — soaring home prices, mortgage rates and insurance bills — they are revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century. The 1970s property tax uprising that one journalist called a “Revolt of the Haves” reshaped American politics. The depth and breadth of today’s proposals threaten to do so once again.

In the last two years alone, plans to substantially reduce or altogether repeal property taxes have emerged in more than two dozen states. Georgia, Indiana and Wyoming already sliced residents’ tax bills by billions of dollars. Republican governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have Florida or Texas competing to see who can lower property taxes the most. Gubernatorial candidates elsewhere are putting tax reform at the center of their campaigns in the hopes of staving off insurgencies that risk overrunning their tenures. Public figures as disparate asElon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Francesca Hong, the socialist who narrowly lost the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, have joined the cause.

Just as it was 50 years ago, the movement appears organic, driven more by meme than political machine, and coming at a moment dominated by consumer concerns around affordability. A surge in home values — up an average of 50% nationwide since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic — has boosted property assessments. Those increases have translated to tax bills that have shocked homeowners and left them worried about the growing burdens of maintaining an asset at the heart of the American dream.

The uprising’s most pitched battles are being fought in Red States where the issue has emerged as yet another dividing line on the right. Traditional conservatives, who believe property taxes foster local decision-making and fund the police, fear they’re losing to the populist rebels dominating the debate.

It’s now common for many Republicans to question the morality of property taxes entirely, said Judge Glock, an economic historian who serves as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Anti-tax activists contend that the levies turn homeowners into vassals who pay rent to the government for the use of their own house — one that could be seized after an unpaid bill.

“That branding has been one of the most successful political slogans in modern memory,” Glock said. “It is incredible how powerful that language has become on the right to strike down anybody who believes in any sort of property taxes.”

For as long as there has been property, there have been property taxes. Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia are said to have documented the stores of grain and livestock their owners owed as tribute.

“I joke in my class that it’s the ‘Ur tax’,” said David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law Schooltracking the tax revolt. “Because they taxed it in Ur.”

Debates over property taxes have been around since the founding of the United States, too, with Alexander Hamilton (pro) and Thomas Jefferson (con) sparring over them in the late 18th century.

Since then, property taxes have become the financial engine powering American cities and schools. Rates vary widely across the nation’s patchwork of cities, counties, townships and other bespoke units of local government. Generally, homeowners who occupy their properties owe between half a percent to just under 2% of their home value in taxes each year depending on where they live, according to the Tax Foundation.

This translates to U.S. state and local governments taking in about $800 billion a year — an amount higher than the annual GDP of Sweden. The levy accounts for about 70% of local tax collections, the Tax Foundation found, with the remainder deriving largely from sales taxes.

Many academics believe this reliance on property taxes is a good thing. Land can’t be moved or hidden. The tax base is stable, less subject to the whims of the economy. And the tax links government services with the home values those services help create: All else equal, a home in a community with quality schools and little crime is worth more than the exact same structure elsewhere.

“Anything that a government does that’s good will increase property values,” Schleicher said. “And by doing that they’ll increase their budget.”

The problem is everyone who is not an economist seems to hate property taxes. They raise costs on an asset that not only provides the physical security of a roof over your family’s head, but that you count on to deliver financial security in retirement and an inheritance to your children. Plus, unlike other taxes, you can do little to stop them. Lose your job and you pay less income tax. Stop spending and you pay less sales tax. But if your neighbor’s house sells for $50,000 more than yours was worth, you might end up with a higher property tax bill.

Most of the time, property owners have faced this reality with begrudging acceptance. But when assessments have gone up too much, too fast the impacts have been profound.

In the 1970s, inflation-driven spikes in home values led to tax bills doubling or more. In California, the epicenter of this spike, homeowners described themselves as vibrating with anger after receiving their annual statements and senior citizens feared the government was going to seize their properties and toss them onto the streets.

The result was Proposition 13, a 1978 citizens’ initiative to roll back California’s property tax rates, cap assessments and enshrine the cuts in the state Constitution. Despite the opposition of the Golden State’s political establishment, a grassroots campaign persuaded nearly two-thirds of voters to back the change. Immediately, California’s property tax receipts dropped 60%, and the constitutional mandate keeps them low to this day. Copycat measures passed in Massachusetts, Michigan and elsewhere.

The movement kicked off an era of American politics defined by hostility to taxation. Former California governor Ronald Reagan imported the anti-tax energy into his presidency. Its influence coursed through the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 1990s. To this day, pledges to resist taxes in all forms remain standard issue for Republican candidates. “‘We can just cut taxes’ — that ideology comes out of the experience of watching it work politically,” said Isaac Martin, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego who has studied Proposition 13’s legacy.

In the flea-market parking lot, Brian Massie, the leader of the ballot initiative campaign to abolish Ohio’s property taxes, stood beside the folding tables looking pleased but not surprised.

“People are just walking up,” said Massie, who donned a custom baseball hat with the campaign’s “Ax OH Tax” slogan. “We don’t have to do anything.”

The scene would have been unimaginable to him a decade ago when he first looked aghast at the bill for his 5,400-square-foot, split-level ranch home along a cul-de-sac outside Cleveland. The retired small business owner educated himself on Ohio’s arcane tax laws, scrutinized the finances of local taxing authorities and offered himself up to any community group that would have him discuss how ever-rising bills made homes less affordable.

For a while, local officials dismissed him as a crank and gadfly. But Massie, 79, now fields phone calls from state legislators who have responded to the property tax fury by introducing bill after bill to cut them. In February, Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate now his party’s Ohio gubernatorial nominee, invited Massie and other organizers to his suburban Columbus home to discuss the abolition campaign.

Interest groups behind citizens’ initiatives in Ohio typically rely on multimillion-dollar budgets to hire petition-carriers. Months ago, Massie claimed to have collected 300,000 signatures relying on volunteers alone, and political watchers believe it could make next year’s ballot.

“This is probably the most robust purely grassroots effort I have ever seen in Ohio,” said Greg Lawson, a senior fellow at the conservative Buckeye Institute think tank.

The cause has benefited from dramatic changes in home economics since Massie first took it on. Nationwide, the median annual property tax payment rose by 25% between 2019 and 2024, or more than $600, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Increases in Ohio’s have been worse than average, even though the state already ranked in the top 10 with the highest property taxes. Typical bills in Ohio have surged to nearly $3,000 a year, the Lincoln Institute found.

“It started out with dollars and cents,” Massie said. “Worried about grandma getting pushed out of her home.”

But getting rid of the property tax, he said, has become about more than money. To him, it restores the anti-tax energy underlying the nation’s founding. He calls the initiative Ohio’s Declaration of Independence, announcing the campaign’s signature gathering progress this spring from behind a full-sized replica of the Resolute Desk from the Oval Office.

“This is the foundation of freedom and liberty,” Massie said. “We are not going to give up that inalienable right of private property.”

In all corners of the country, Massie-like figures are forcing lawmakers to act. Legislators in Montana cut taxes for owner-occupied homes. In Iowa, they capped how much local property tax revenue can grow. Oklahoma lawmakers have placed a measure on the November ballot to restrict future property tax increases.

The proposals have freaked out local governments and organizations that provide or rely on public services. Cities, counties, schools, labor unions, hospitals and chambers of commerce have formed coalitions to fight back. Budget advisers to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a moderate Republican, warned this year that abolishing property taxes “would quite literally ‘defund’ the police” with the same fate befalling fire departments, schools and libraries.

“You’re actually talking the immediate forced liquidation of patrol units and the degradation of emergency response,” said Robert Butler, a past president of the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police who serves as police chief in Independence, a 7,500-person town south of Cleveland. “You’re gonna wipe them out.”

Local government leaders argue that property taxes are so embedded into the structure of American government that it is hard to imagine alternatives. To replace the $24 billion lost by doing away with property taxes in Ohio, the state’s average income tax rate would have to rise to just under 13 percent, the Tax Foundation found, a levy almost as high as what millionaires pay in California.

Massie dismissed the warnings as alarmist. (“We’re not anarchists,” he said.) Government needs to shrink, he argued, and he assumes the Legislature will find alternatives. A fairer system, he argued, would make people pay for the government services they use, but not those they don’t.

“I’m not willing to give up my home for a book or a walk in the park,” Massie said.

So far, most states have cushioned their property tax cuts by phasing them in or using other dollars to backfill lost revenue. Texas used its budget surplus. North Dakota took money from its oil-and-gas extraction tax.

But in Indiana, where last year the Legislature cut taxes for primary residences and Gov. Mike Braun, a Republican, has since mused about abolishing property taxes for senior citizens, local governments already have less in their coffers.

Charlestown, a small community on the Kentucky border, is seeing rapid growth from the redevelopment of a former ammunition plant. An influx of jobs and people normally would boost property tax revenue and public services. Instead, the city is cutting its budget.

This summer, a public park with mini golf, a splash pad and roller-skating rink went from being open seven days a week to four. For the coming winter, residents on cul-de-sacs were told their streets won’t be cleared immediately because the city could not pay snowplow drivers overtime.

Still, Mayor Treva Hodges said she understands the drive for change. She and her husband have been fighting the local assessor over a reevaluation of their 90-year-old home that caused their taxes to go up $650.

“They raised our value like 45%. Something ridiculous,” Hodges said. “We challenged it because we haven’t done anything to our house to make it worth this.”

For more than a year, DeSantis has been at the vanguard of the national anti-property-tax movement. His arguments have blended rising costs and with the populist branding of the levies as unamerican. Local governments in Florida, he said, have gotten too fat on revenues from growing assessments and homeowners are right to feel affronted.

“Year after year, you’re just having to write a check just for the privilege of being able to maintain ownership of something that is supposedly yours,” DeSantis said in May as he unveiled a proposal to eliminate the tax for more than 90% of primary residences.

But fellow Republicans in the statehouse balked at jettisoning billions in tax revenue used for schools. They stripped out DeSantis’ proposed cuts to education funding before sending his property tax measure to the November ballot. Incoming House Speaker Sam Garrison said fellow Republican lawmakers agreed with DeSantis on the need for cuts but “we’ve also been frank with voters there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The road to Election Day has been rocky. The state Republican Party took months to endorse the plan after U.S. Sen. Rick Scott and other GOP leaders expressed reservations about impacts to local budgets. Several Republican sheriffs have blasted the measure — one called it a “train wreck” — that could wreak havoc on their bottom lines. Even DeSantis has distanced himself, saying that while he expects to vote yes, he will not raise money or campaign for it because its reforms do not go far enough.

These splits among Florida Republicans fall along emerging ruptures in the Trump-era party. In Texas, where property tax reform has been at the top of the statehouse agenda for years, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has warned that Abbott’s latest proposal to eliminate school property taxes on primary residences would force the state to hike sales taxes to unsustainable levels. In Ohio, DeWine vetoed more aggressive bills before signing a slimmed-down package focused mostly on limiting future tax hikes.

“We have to provide for our schools; we have to provide for fire, EMS, police and children’s services and many other things,” DeWine said in December. (Both DeWine and DeSantis are prohibited by term limits from seeking reelection as governor this year.)

Republican lawmakers frustrated by DeWine’s reticence are salivating at what a Ramaswamy administration could bring. Ramaswamy called for “the largest property tax rollback in Ohio history” by cutting levels to what they were prior to the pandemic.

Deep cuts would force Ohio to consolidate local agencies — Ohio has 611 school districts and 1,308 townships in its 88 counties — an effort previously resisted because “no one wants to lose their mascot,” said state Rep. David Thomas, a Republican who has quarterbacked the Legislature’s efforts.

Yet Thomas believes Massie’s abolition initiative is too extreme. And after Ramaswamy parroted populist talking points in his campaign kickoff speech last year — “If you own land, it should not feel like it’s a lease,” he said — the candidate backed off a pledge to eliminate the tax entirely.

Massie is frustrated with the response from Ramaswamy and other politicians, whom he believes are trying to co-opt the energy behind his initiative while disavowing its goal. “We’ve declared war on our legislators, our executive and our judicial branch,” Massie said.

While the argument that property taxes make homeowners renters to the government wins support on social media — where Musk,former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and others repeat it to the point of virality — abolition has struggled when pushed into the policymaking mainstream.

In 2024, North Dakota voters were presented with an initiative to repeal property taxes. They rejected it by a nearly 2-to-1 margin after local governments, labor unions and business leaders argued the proposed cuts were too severe without viable alternatives to replace the lost revenue.

“I actually thought after we defeated this thing so handily in North Dakota that it might die down nationally,” said Chad Oban, the head of the state’s largest teachers’ union who ran the opposition campaign against the measure. “People would be thinking that, ‘Hey if we can’t do this in North Dakota, I mean, jeez, where can we do it?’”

Instead, the year after the initiative’s failure, North Dakota passed a landmark property tax cut. Oban said lawmakers acted because of continuing pressure on household budgets. He attributed the broader movement’s persistence to the core group arguing that property taxes prevent homeowners from ever owning their homes.

“That is a message that was compelling to enough people to get it on the ballot, not necessarily to pass it,” Oban said.

The experience in North Dakota could be repeating itself in Florida and Ohio. Recent polls inboth states show initial support for drastic property tax cuts that fall below the threshold needed for passage once voters hear about potential local deficits or alternative tax hikes.

Indeed, there is some irony that the rise in property taxes has led to mass fury given the phenomenon’s underlying source. Tax bills have gone up because homeowners have achieved an astounding increase in wealth. Since 2020, American households’ real estate equity has risen 88%, an increase of $17 trillion, Federal Reserve data shows. (Tax cut proponents note that these gains are illiquid and can mean little when bills arrive.)

And the relief for homeowners provided by lowering property taxes may counterintuitively make housing less affordable. A 2024 study led by researchers from the federal government and Yale University found that property tax reductions in Georgia led to home price increases. The cuts enticed prospective buyers into bidding wars and encouraged homeowners to hold onto their properties longer, lessening available supply. The rising prices particularly harmed younger, prospective first-time homebuyers while disproportionately benefitting older residents who had owned their homes for long periods, the researchers determined.

Similar generational disparities have long played out in California because of Proposition 13. A Los Angeles resident who has owned a home for 50 years that’s now worth $1 million pays less than $500 annually in property taxes. Yet if their neighbor spent $1 million to buy the house next door last year they would owe $10,000.

As local property tax receipts plummeted, California’s state government assumed responsibility for education funding and turned to volatile income taxes to pay for it. Because those revenues rely on an up-and-down stock market, the state budget swings wildly year-to-year between surplus and deficit.

California’s fiscal foibles are one of many reasons GOP governors like Abbott and DeSantis poke fun at the state. DeSantis often says doing the opposite of California is his governing “cheat code.” But by embracing steep property tax cuts, Republican leaders risk tying themselves in the same knots, Martin said.

“By ruling out the best tool available for local government, you’re going to get a worse system and you’re going to be stuck with it,” he said. “Then you’re going to end up with people creating workarounds and workarounds to those workarounds.”

Today’s property tax revolt might be best viewed as part of a growing bipartisan trend that taxes borne by tipped workers, middle classes and homeowners are unfair and unnecessary while other targets could and should be paying more. Some Democrats in the U.S. Senate have proposed sharply cutting income taxes for upper-middle-class Americans in exchange for higher rates for the wealthiest.

Similarly, DeSantis has defended his property tax plan because it delivers relief for homeowners with primary residences. He’s asserted that local governments could recoup the lost revenue by charging owners of second homes more.

"In Palm Beach, they're sitting on a gold mine," DeSantis said in May. "They've got all these people who live there three months of the year, and they buy $25 million homes. That should be your tax base."

The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page blasted the comments as something out of the soak-the-rich playbook of socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In this way, Schleicher contended, the current uprising seems likely to build on what happened 50 years ago. Where that rebellion led to cuts in all forms of taxation, this one provides momentum toward doing away with all taxes for certain groups of people.

“In this era, we’re trying to carve people out of paying taxes entirely,” Schleicher said. “Except for the billionaires.”

Gary Fineout contributed to this article.