Consumer prices climbed last month and home construction dropped, making the Federal Reserve’s task of maintaining growth while simultaneously limiting inflation more difficult, economists said before government reports this week.

Climbing gasoline and food costs pushed consumer prices up 0.5% in April, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey ahead of the Labor Department’s May 15 report. Builders broke ground on 1.48 million new homes at an annual pace, down from a 1.518 million rate in March, the Commerce Department is forecast to report a day later.

Rising prices underscore the Fed’s concern that inflation remains the “predominant” risk to the economy, while the housing slump threatens to unravel their forecast of “moderate” growth. The reports will keep the central bank’s interest-rate policy gridlocked in coming months.

“Inflation pressures in the economy aren’t accelerating but they’re not receding either,” an economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, Ellen Zentner, said. “Housing will not start turning around until mid-year. It leaves the Fed’s hands tied for the foreseeable future.”

Core consumer prices, which exclude food and energy, rose 0.2% after a 0.1% gain, according to the survey median. Estimates for consumer prices ranged from gains of 0.4% to 1%, and forecasts for the core rate spanned gains of 0.1% to 0.3%. Gasoline prices have risen by a third this year and climbed last week to within a couple cents of the record reached in September 2005 following Hurricane Katrina.

Core consumer prices were probably up 2.4% from a year earlier, after a 2.5% gain in March, according to the survey median. Core inflation remains “somewhat elevated,” Fed policy makers said in a May 9 statement announcing they’d kept the benchmark interest rate unchanged at 5.25%.