Building Neighborhoods Where Everyone Belongs
Vesi is a values-first neighborhood development company creating pathways to ownership, stability, and long-term community impact. We acquire and restore properties, place them in trust stewardship, design neighborhoods where residents, local business owners, and institutions can participate in shared-ownership pathways. By combining decades of evidence-backed shared-equity models with modern financing tools, Vesi builds neighborhoods that are stable, affordable, and designed to last for generations.
Our approach balances accessible local ownership with a diverse portfolio of assets that meet the market needs of people and align with mission-driven investors. Roughly 80% of Vesi properties are shared-ownership homes or businesses, where occupants have opportunities to own a percentage of shares enabling them to build equity at an affordable, capped rate. The remaining 20% are income-generating properties, providing predictable returns to fund Vesi's growth. Across every project, Vesi integrates research, best practices, and a mission-locked architecture, including a nonprofit, a public benefit corporation, and a Perpetual Purpose Trust, to ensure lasting community benefit.
Our Founder: April De Simone
April De Simone is the founder of Vesi and a transdisciplinary practitioner with more than three decades of experience working across housing, policy, design, and community development. Her work focuses on building real world systems that align ownership, stewardship, and long term stability of residential, commercial, and land assets.
Vesi grew out of April ’s sustained work examining how decisions embedded in policy, finance, and the built environment shape the conditions of neighborhoods and opportunity over time. The model reflects a commitment to shared-ownership, responsible resource use, and place based investment that centers long-term public benefit over extraction. In Trenton, New Jersey, she and her husband, Marcus, placed their own home into Vesi’s neighborhood trust as its first property. The project demonstrates new ownership models and alternative pathways for households and communities.
Alongside Vesi, April leads a portfolio of purpose-driven brands where she works with clients and partners across sectors, regions, and scales to shape systems and environments that balance public benefit, responsible resource use, and long term impact. This includes leading nationally recognized initiatives like Undesign the Redline and The Practice of Democracy: A View From The High Line, and has contributed to federal engagement efforts through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Building Purpose Community Engagement Toolkit. These experiences inform Vesi’s approach to governance, community participation, and purpose-driven impact.
Her upbringing in the Bronx, New York underpins a sustained focus on how decisions and perceptions take form through home and land systems, institutions, and shared spaces, shaping generational patterns across communities and environments. Her work has been recognized with honors including Enterprise Community Partners’ Impactful 40 and New York University’s Public Service Award. She holds a Master of Science in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design and a Master of Architecture from the Michael Graves School of Public Architecture.
