Vice President Kamala Harris said Thursday that federal agencies are taking new steps to stop racial discrimination in appraising home values by proposing a rule intended to ensure the automated formulas used to price housing are fair.

“Everyone should be able to take full advantage of their aspiration and dream of owning a home,” Harris told reporters on a telephone call.

The announcement of the proposed rule comes a year after President Joe Biden’s administration laid out a plan to stop appraisers from systemically undervaluing the homes of Black people and other underrepresented groups.

Low appraisals make it harder for these homeowners to build wealth and access home equity lines of credit, worsening racial inequality. Appraisers help to determine the value of a home so buyers can receive a mortgage.

The extent of the discrimination by appraisers can be massive, in some instances more than halving the value of a property.

In Indianapolis, one Black homeowner found the appraised value of her home jumped to $259,000 from $125,000 after she declined to disclose her race on her application and removed all family photos and African American art in the home.

Because many financial institutions and mortgage companies use formulas to judge the value of a home, the proposed rule would set out new standards to prevent discrimination.

Companies that rely on appraisals would need to adopt policies to improve the accuracy of their appraisals, stop data manipulation and avoid conflicts of interest.

Big Tech publishers’ bill advances

A bipartisan California bill that would require big technology companies to pay publishers for using news reports that help drive their profits passed the state Assembly despite a threat last week from Facebook parent Meta that the law would spur it to remove news articles from its platforms.

The Assembly voted 46-6 to pass Assembly Bill 886, the California Journalism Preservation Act by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, co-authored by Assemblymen Bill Essayli, a Riverside Republican, and Josh Lowenthal, a Democrat representing Long Beach.

It now heads to the state Senate.

“Free press is in our constitution, and it is at risk right now, that is what this bill is about,” Wicks told the Assembly. “Publishers deserve to be paid a journalism usage fee relative to how much their content is used on these platforms.”

Wednesday, Meta in a statement said that “if the Journalism Preservation Act passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers.”

Wages not driver of inflation, study finds

Rapid wage growth has not been an important driver of inflation, according to a new analysis published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The recent run-up in the employment cost index, a measure of wages favored among economists and policymakers, “explains only about 0.1 percentage point” of the 3 percentage-point increase in consumer price inflation excluding food and energy, San Francisco Fed economist Adam Shapiro said in an article published Tuesday on the bank’s website.

“This leaves open other explanations for the high correlation between labor-cost growth and inflation. For instance, recent evidence shows that wage growth tends to follow inflation, as well as expectations of future inflation,” Shapiro wrote. “Overall, the results highlight that recent labor-cost growth is likely to be a poor gauge of risks to the inflation outlook.”

Shapiro analyzed the relationship between changes in the employment cost index and nonhousing services prices, a category that policymakers including Fed Chair Jerome Powell have singled out as key for the inflation outlook, finding only minimal pass-through.

At the central bank’s last policy meeting last month, “participants emphasized that core nonhousing services inflation had shown few signs of slowing in the past few months,” according to meeting minutes published May 24.

“Some participants remarked that a further easing in labor market conditions would be needed to help bring down inflation in this component.”

Compiled from Associated Press, staff and Bloomberg reports.