Editing Great Society (section)

===Rural development===
A number of measures were introduced to improve socio-economic conditions in rural areas. Under Title III of the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, Special Programs to Combat Rural Poverty, the Office for Economic Opportunity was authorized to act as a lender of last resort for rural families who needed money to help them permanently increase their earning capacity. Loans could be made to purchase land, improve the operation of family farms, allow participation in cooperative ventures, and finance non-agricultural business enterprises, while local cooperatives which served low-income rural families could apply for another category of loans for similar purposes.<ref name="autogenerated2"/>

Title III also made loans and grants available to local groups to improve housing, education, and child care services for migrant farm workers, while Titles I and II also included potentially important programs for rural development. Title I established the Job Corps which enrolled school dropouts in community service projects: 40% of the corpsmen were to work in a Youth Conservation Corps to carry out resource conservation, beautification, and development projects in the National Forests and countryside. Arguably more important for rural areas were the Community Action Programs authorized by Title II. Federal money was allocated to States according to their needs for job training, housing, health, and welfare assistance, and the States were then to distribute their shares of the Community Action grants on the basis of proposals from local public or non-profit private groups.<ref name="autogenerated2">{{cite book |last=Roth |first=Dennis |chapter-url=http://www.nal.usda.gov/ric/ricpubs/rural_development_chap5.pdf |chapter=The Johnson Administration and the Great Society |title=Federal Rural Development Policy in the Twentieth Century |publisher=United States Department of Agriculture |access-date=August 26, 2013 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140824082628/http://www.nal.usda.gov/ric/ricpubs/rural_development_chap5.pdf |archive-date=August 24, 2014 }}</ref>

The Public Works and Economic Development Act of 1965 reorganized the Areas Redevelopment Administration (ARA) into the [[Economic Development Administration]] (EDA), and authorized $3.3&nbsp;billion over 5 years while specifying seven criteria for eligibility. The list included low median family income, but the 6% or higher unemployment applied to the greatest number of areas, while the Act also mentioned outmigration from rural areas as a criterion. In an attempt to go beyond what one writer described as "ARA's failed scattershot approach" of providing aid to individual counties and inspired by the European model of regional development, the EDA encouraged counties to form Economic Development Districts (EDDs) as it was recognized that individual distressed counties (called RAs or Redevelopment Areas) lacked sufficient resources for their own development.<ref name="autogenerated2"/>

EDDs encompassed from 5 to 15 counties and both planned and implemented development with EDA funding and technical assistance, and each EDD had a "growth center" (another concept borrowed from Europe) called a redevelopment center if it was located in an RA or development center if in another county. With the exception of the growth centers, EDD counties were ineligible for assistance unless they were RAs, but they were all expected to benefit from "coordinated districtwide development planning."<ref name="autogenerated2"/>