St. Pete-Clearwater Sun

Florida’s push for property tax relief is running into a complication that advocates say lawmakers should have seen coming: an entire class of homeowners left standing outside the benefit, despite paying taxes like everyone else.

As voters prepare to weigh in on a constitutional amendment that would restructure the state’s property tax system, the Federation of Manufactured Homeowners of Florida has come out in opposition — not because its members oppose tax relief, but because the current proposal doesn’t deliver any to them.

The issue comes down to a quirk of ownership. Many manufactured homeowners own their houses outright but lease the land beneath them. Under the amendment as written, that distinction means they’d be excluded from the direct tax reduction other homeowners would receive.

“The benefits of that tax change will not benefit manufactured homeowners because we own the home, but we don’t own the property,” said John Calabrese, the federation’s president, who lives in Colony Cove, a manufactured home community in Ellenton. “So it’s a commercial property tax while we pay taxes.”

That’s a distinction without much of a practical difference for the residents footing the bill. Calabrese noted his community pays taxes and absorbs the same cost pressures as everyone else in the state — without the same relief on the table.

“We will get no reduction in our taxes,” he said.

Notably, the federation isn’t asking to kill tax reform — it’s asking for the reform to actually include them.

“We want tax reform that’s equal… we feel like we’re being cut out of this,” Calabrese said. “So we’re not against tax reform. We just want good tax reform that doesn’t ignore a big segment of the population.”

That argument carries added weight given who’s affected. Calabrese said rising lot rents, grocery prices and utility costs are squeezing residents who are disproportionately retirees living on fixed incomes — the very population tax relief efforts are typically designed to help.

“Most people here are on fixed incomes,” he said. “Some of them have been on fixed incomes for, you know, for decades now.”

Fellow Colony Cove resident Larry Dunn said he’s concerned about the toll on older Floridians in particular.

“I think it’s going to have a lot of adverse effects, you know, to seniors in particular,” Dunn said.

Dunn argued the oversight fits a broader pattern of manufactured homeowners getting sidelined in housing and tax policy debates.

“We’re kind of like a red-headed stepchild,” Dunn said. “If you look at a lot of stuff that’s been passed up until this last legislature, there’s very little that has helped mobile or manufactured homeowners.”

Whatever the outcome, the episode raises a fair question for legislators: if a signature tax relief measure can’t account for how thousands of everyday, fixed-income Floridians actually own their homes, how many other blind spots does it have? Voters will decide the amendment’s fate in November.

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