On the heels of a historic "blue wave" in other parts of the country, and a near-victory for socialist-aligned Senate candidate Angie Nixon, progressive groups in Florida are making a bold play for 2028: a rent control ballot initiative.
"Floridians for Fair Rent" is a campaign to put a statewide rent stabilization measure on the 2028 ballot by citizen petition. The proposal would set a cap on annual rent increases at 3% or matched to inflation, whichever is lower. The measure would apply only to tenants of corporate landlords with large-scale rental portfolios, not to individual small-time landlords.
" We started down this journey because the high cost of living in Florida and in this country is the number one issue that is driving people and making people's lives here in Florida untenable. And the rent crisis in Florida has been one of the worst in the entire country," said Ivanna Gonzalez, chief campaigns officer for progressive group Florida Rising.
Gonzalez told WLRN a coalition of advocacy groups including Florida Rising, Miami Workers Center and Community Justice Project have been working on the campaign for some time, even before this month's election results.
That being said, the roughly 3-point margin in the race between Nixon — a recent member of the Democratic Socialists of America — and incumbent Republican Ashley Moody, signaled to organizers that Floridian voters are open to ideas that are more politically left-of-center.
" Angie Nixon's success in Florida showed us that people are willing to see through the scare tactics and the lies because they are feeling it in their pockets so deeply they know that something has to be different," Gonzalez said.
Florida has the highest percentage of cost-burdened renters of any U.S. state, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. Rents in Florida are 18% above the national average, and close to 800,000 Floridians pay more than half of their household income on rent.
A similar rent stabilization measure passed in Orange County, Florida, in 2023 with 59% of voters in favor of limiting rent increases for one year. Florida Realtors and the Florida Apartments Association, two politically powerful pro-landlord groups, sued to block the measure from taking effect, taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court where justices declined to hear their case.
The Florida legislature then banned local governments from enacting rent control measures, effectively killing Orange County's initiative.
An informational page for Florida Realtors' Political Action Committee (PAC) reads: "In politics, money talks, and Florida Realtors PAC gives us a voice. When REALTORS® speak through Florida Realtors PAC, Tallahassee listens."
With Florida's rent control preemption law in effect, organizers say that a citizen ballot initiative is the only route left available to get rent control on the books.
"This is going to require the strength of everyday Floridians to get it on the ballot and get it passed," said Corryn Freeman, campaign manager at Floridians for Fair Rent.
In 2025, the Florida legislature passed House Bill 1205, which set strict limits on petition collection for citizen-led ballot initiatives. The law was proposed as a way to keep groups from outside the state influencing Florida law, but critics saw it as a way of suppressing residents' voices.
Under the law, individual volunteers cannot collect more than 25 petitions without registering with the state as a "petition circulator" and paying certain fees that some groups say are prohibitive.
In order to work around this hurdle, Floridians for Fair Rent are asking voters to sign up on the campaign website to request a petition in the mail.
The group is filing the petition language with the Division of Elections this week. Once the language is approve — which the campaign expects to happen in January — voters who signed up will receive the petition in the mail and will have three days to fill it out and mail it back.
Freeman said this is the first time this method is being attempted at a large scale since the passage of HB 1205, and the group hopes to gather 100,000 sign-ups before January.
In order to make the ballot in the next statewide election, the petition must be signed by 891,589 verified voters in at least 14 of Florida's 27 congressional districts by February of 2028. The referendum must then pass with at least 60% voter approval.
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