Legacy of Apartheid (possibly Part I)

Today I started classes at UCT and found myself in an Urban Geography class where all the students already knew each other because it is a small department, and had all already taken a course with this professor.
In her introduction on the topic, she asked a question along the lines of "What is the main cause of housing inequity in South Africa?" with a student offering the answer of the Grouping of Persons Act, the law at the backbone of apartheid.
What struck me was the extent to which this answer seemed obvious and factual. The question of housing inequality was not a rambling of musings on not only race relations, but class and prejudice and land use, and intentional and unintential biases, but rather one Act which had codified humans by race in a country where democratic elections only began a little more than 10 years ago.
It could be easily argued that housing inequalities in the US are also attributed to racism of the past, that lack of access to resources forty years ago created the self segregated neighborhoods of today. But what it does not answer is how on the surface the situations can have the same answer when you compare a law that was overturned ten years ago, to a laws that were overturned thirty or forty years ago.

I think my question really, is if South Africa sees all these problems, and is working to fix them, the WTF's wrong with the US. For example, I assume because of the legacy of aparthied, housing is a constitutional right in South Africa, and the goverment is required to show evidence of making progress on the issue. They have built 2 million subsidized houses since 1996, and while some are small or crappy or somewhat falling apart, it seems quite better than zero.

So I'm curious to know, and maybe I'll try to research this before my work load goes crazy, but what happened after the Civil Rights movements in the US in comparison to what is happening now in South Africa? Who's on the right track? I'm almost afraid to say, but feel it may be true, that even if South Africa is attacked the inequities head on and therefore more effectively, that knowledge might not even be of use to policy in the US, because the current issue isn't direct racism anymore, but, as I've argued, more classism. It seems the time to address the outcomes of institutionalized racism were right after we ended it, rather than waiting out to see what would happen.