Biden's ABC town hall: Former VP lays out vision in stark contrast to Trump's

ABC News senior congressional correspondent Mary Bruce said viewers saw something that they haven't seen very often due to the pandemic: Biden interacting directly with voters.

"His campaign feels he shines in these moments, that he does best when he is able to speak directly with voters," she said.

"There was a lot of deep diving that he was doing into his policy proposals going forward. This was a night largely about Joe Biden and, actually surprising, not a lot about his opponent," she added.

BIDEN'S CLAIM: "I do not propose banning fracking. I think you have to make sure that
fracking is, in fact, not admitting methane or polluting the well or dealing with what can be small earthquakes and how they're drilling. So it has to be managed very, very well, No. 1. No. 2, what we have to do is the future rests in renewable energy."

FACT CHECK: Biden said he does not support a ban on fracking, the shorthand for the process of extracting natural gas, but he does support limiting its environmental impact, blocking its use on public lands and putting more focus on renewable energy.

The debate around fracking has focused on whether a candidate would "ban" the entire industry, but a president would only have the power to stop issuing new leases for oil and gas activity on public land, not activity on private property. 

Biden has said that he doesn't want to add new fracking on public lands. He has said he wants to move away from fracking and focus on more renewable energy sources to eventually get net-zero emissions, including preventing the release of the methane from natural gas activity.

He has also argued that a transition to clean energy is necessary to keep people employed and that it won't be possible to immediately eliminate all fossil fuels, including natural gas. 

Biden's environmental plan calls for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and for a massive investment in clean energy, including training fossil fuel workers for clean energy jobs.

-ABC News' Stephanie Ebbs and Averi Harper

BIDEN'S CLAIM: “(If) my home was in a white neighborhood on one side of the highway and yours is in a Black neighborhood, same exact home, your home will start off being valued 29% less than my home, yet your insurance for that home will be higher. You'll be taxed more for it. We’ve got to end this.”

FACT CHECK: Biden’s statement is generally accurate.

After the town hall concluded, Biden’s campaign told ABC News he had been referring to a 2018 study by the Brookings Institution that found “homes of similar quality in neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth 23 percent less ($48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses) in majority black neighborhoods, compared to those with very few or no black residents.”

His campaign said Biden misspoke and meant to say 23%.

The 1968 Fair Housing Act is supposed to prevent discrimination that leads to those disparities. But civil rights groups and anti-poverty advocates have long argued that even with the law, cities and states can perpetuate housing segregation through zoning laws, insurance and lending policies, as well as tax credits that often favor wealthier white families over others.

Under Trump, Housing Secretary Ben Carson finalized a rule in August 2019 making it harder for people to allege discrimination – a proposal advocated by insurance companies and others in the housing industry that said regulations weren’t clear enough.

-ABC News' Anne Flaherty

BIDEN'S CLAIM: Biden said he had not seen a distribution plan for Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19. "What's happening is there is no plan to figure out how to distribute it," he said. "How many -- you know, we have 500,000, you know, vials of it. Well, we don't have all the testing equipment. We don't have all the ability to get it to the people who need it.”

FACT CHECK: Biden is correct to suggest that Trump has overstated the promise of Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19.

However, there is a federal plan for distribution of the treatment touted by Trump.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has said the government is stockpiling doses of antibody treatments for Americans and that it plans to distribute those doses to state governments and hospitals similar to how it delivered the drug remdesivir, another therapeutic that has been administered to people with COVID-19.

Since Oct. 1, hospitals have been able to purchase remdesivir, also known as Veklury, directly from the drug’s distributor. Over the past five months, the U.S. government had overseen the allocation and distribution of the drug in its limited supply.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar has said his agency does not anticipate a problem with delivering the doses so long as the drug receives authorization from regulators.

-ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos, Sony Salzman and Anne Flaherty