On behalf of Soup’s Board of Directors, I am excited to announce that we have selected Nicolas King to be our new executive director. Nic will build on our accomplishments in housing. He’ll also expand our efforts to advance our beliefs that everyone deserves a place to call home and that a broad socioeconomic mix of renters and homeowners make up the most vibrant communities. 

Nic is a leader who comes to us with a long career in public service. He is a lawyer by training who served for many years in the San Francisco city government. First, he served as an advisor to Mayor Gavin Newsom, then to Supervisor Bevan Dufty, and later in various capacities under the City Administrator. 

Most recently, he worked at San Francisco Public Works where he improved processes in construction project delivery and contractor selection. He also led citywide efforts to promote collaborative partnering on San Francisco construction projects. In all of his roles, he gained a wide variety of experiences with the legislative process, permitting, and policy implementation. Nic will bring to Soup his experience with organizational development and internal process improvement.

Nic is also the former director of non-profit programs devoted to justice and economic empowerment. He ran a public-private micro-loan program for small businesses in Los Angeles, and an indigent defense program in the East Bay.

We’re excited to have Nic join at this moment, when many local and state policymakers seem to acknowledge that we need to turn around the forty-year drought of building new housing. “Today’s scarcity of housing and the concentration of wealth is not inevitable. They’re the result of decades of poor policy choices and I’m passionate about trying to correct things,” Nic said. “Soup excites me because our work touches on so many important issues–building wealth, building homes, increasing density and doing it without gentrification to name a few. I love working with a community of doers and donors who are committed to this work.” 

Nic has a lifelong passion for learning more about how we might better order our lives together. At Yale he studied urban government and political science. At NYU School of Law, Nic was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar and studied government, community economic development and indigent defense.

Nic is a native New Yorker and now long-time Californian. He lives in the Bay Area with wife and children.