Miami Herald warns Florida property-tax cuts leave renters behind

Florida Republicans are again flirting with property-tax cuts, and the Miami Herald’s editorial board is worried the wrong people might benefit.

In two editorials, the board argues that cutting property taxes risks “missing renters” and that lawmakers are overlooking key problems in their approach. The premise is that homeowners may see relief, while renters—who don’t receive a tax bill with their name on it—could be left out. In Florida’s political economy, that concern is treated as a moral accounting problem: who “deserves” the cut.

But property taxation is not a morality play. It is price theory.

A property tax is a levy on an asset that yields a stream of housing services—either to an owner-occupier or to tenants. The economic question is not who receives the bill, but who bears the burden after markets adjust. Tax incidence depends on elasticities: how responsive housing supply is to price, how easily tenants can move, and how quickly capital can shift into or out of building and maintaining rental stock.

The editorial board’s instinct that renters can be harmed is not wrong—but not for the reason implied. In the short run, landlords cannot instantly change the housing supply. If demand is strong and vacancies tight, landlords may raise rents regardless of tax changes; if demand is weak, they may not. Over longer horizons, however, property taxes are capitalized into property values. A credible, durable tax cut tends to raise land and property prices, because buyers bid up assets whose future tax drag is lower. That “benefit” accrues largely to existing owners at the moment the policy becomes believable.

Renters, meanwhile, face a different channel: investment incentives. Lower recurring taxes can make new construction and renovation more attractive, expanding supply over time and putting downward pressure on rents—if zoning, permitting, and regulatory constraints allow supply to respond. Florida’s housing affordability problem is not primarily that the state lacks clever ways to rebate taxes to renters; it’s that local governments ration housing through land-use controls while Tallahassee pretends the resulting scarcity is a natural disaster.

The Miami Herald’s editorials implicitly ask lawmakers to design property-tax policy to hit the correct political constituencies. That is the trap. Once you treat the tax base as a moral person—homeowners good, landlords suspect, renters virtuous—you invite carve-outs, credits, phase-ins, “targeted relief”, and a compliance industry to match. The result is typically higher administrative costs, more lobbying, and less transparency.

If Florida wants lower housing costs, it should focus on what actually moves prices: allow more building, reduce regulatory friction, and stop using the property-tax code as a substitute for fixing supply. Otherwise, the state will keep redistributing paper gains among incumbents while renters are offered the usual consolation prize: a press release.