Whether tax relief adds listings or subtracts them turns on one design question: whether the benefit belongs to the owner or to the address. Georgia's 2024 law attaches it to the address [10], and Illinois's expanded senior freezes do the same, since a senior who moves forfeits the freeze [11]. The rebates and exemptions expanded in New Jersey, New York and Texas follow the owner instead [9].
Attach it to the address and you have built an exit toll that grows without anyone voting on it again. Proposition 13 held assessed growth to 2 percent a year or inflation, whichever is lower, and reassessed the parcel only at sale [4][5]. The lower-of rule means 2 percent is a ceiling even in years when inflation runs well above it [16], so the gap between what a house is worth and what it is taxed on widens in most years and never resets while the owner stays. Prop 13 passed in 1978 and this column runs in 2026: 48 years of accumulated divergence available to a California house that has never changed hands [15]. A seller repays that whole gap in the first year of the new bill, which is why the research finds people stop moving [6], and why the mismatch runs in both directions, with older couples in family houses and growing families in smaller ones [7].
Florida's amendment, as described, is not the Georgia design. Emily Hamilton's Governing column, which the publisher labels opinion, indicts assessment caps rather than exemptions [3], and a larger homestead exemption is a dollar figure that applies to whichever primary residence a voter owns, so on its own it charges nobody for moving [2]. The distortion in the Florida ballot sits in the second clause, the directive to consider ending all non-school-district property taxes for primary residences [2]. By construction that leaves rentals and second homes carrying a levy that owner-occupiers no longer pay. It is a real consequence, and it is not the one the lock-in literature measures.
The constituency absent from every version of this is renters, half of whom now spend at least 30 percent of income on housing [12]. A homestead benefit never reaches them directly. The indirect route runs through turnover, and caps suppress turnover by making the exchanges people would otherwise agree to not worth the tax [17][18].
Hamilton's alternative is the plain one: require rates to fall automatically as assessments rise, so a locality cannot collect more revenue simply because the market moved [13]. That keeps assessments accurate and moves the fight to the rate, a figure that appears on a ballot and can be argued about. It also delivers nothing that compounds quietly for twenty years, which is the feature that makes assessment caps easy to pass and expensive to unwind [8].
