Awkwardness

My job in a hotel's "team member assistance center" now does not now primarily consist of telling people they have been laid off. I am now spending my days trying to help (or pressuring, depending who you ask) the 250 hotel employees residing there to find more suitable and permanent abodes. I have two main obstacles facing me:
1. Greed. Landlords have decided that the tight rental market in New Orleans justifies charging four times the normal rate for apartments. People are advertisting houses in my neighborhood for over $5000 a month.
2. Ignorance. We're supposed to be "teaching people how to fish," in the words of one of my overly optimistic and slightly naive bosses. And no, the fish reference has nothing to do with the smell of the apartments after tenants left rotting food in their warm refrigerators for a month. Instead, she means we should be pointing people towards resources and letting them do the rest. Our employees take that to mean that we're finding them all apartments and taking care of all the details.
Yesterday I tried to engage in the spirit of teaching to fish. Instead of responding to an ad by e-mail for an employee I gamely suggested she type it herself. When she looked at me blankly I even suggested the format for the e-mail (like, hey, leave your number). When she insisted that she didn't know how to use "this stuff" I said, no problem, just type it and I'll hit send. I looked down from a conversation a minute late to see she had gotten out three words - but no spaces between them, because she didn't know about space bars. Sorry to abuse the fish metaphor, but I let the poor girl off the hook and felt pretty silly about the whole fiasco.