(cheering) NARRATOR: As Mayor Tony Williams cruised toward reelection, his campaign suddenly hit a snag.

TOM: Thousands of petitions turned in by D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams to get his name on the September primary ballot may be inaccurate and some possibly even fake.

BRUCE: Those bogus names included actor Dudley Moore, who's dead; British prime minister Tony Blair and UN Secretary Kofi Annan, who are not even U.S. citizens.

NARRATOR: The forged signatures quickly ballooned into a full-blown scandal, forcing Mayor Williams off the primary ballot and leaving a write-in campaign as his only option.

He still won easily.

WILLIAMS: I was always underestimated politically.

I was a neophyte.

I didn't really know what I was doing.

You know, babe in the woods, and I always said, "Well, I must know something.

I got reelected.

I mean, I served eight years as mayor."

NARRATOR: Mayor Williams kicked off his second term with a bold pledge.

REPORTER: The mayor wants to attract 100,000 new residents to the district in the next 10 years.

WILLIAMS: We've got to lure back residents who fled the city in the past, and we will do this, but we will do it not at the expense of those who today call the District home.

HARRY: People thought he was nutty when he said, you know, we're going to add 100,000 new residents.

WILLIAMS: And actually, I think most people didn't even notice, but it's come true.

NARRATOR: The influx of new residents changed the city in lasting ways.

CATHY: The city used to be a lot of single family homes and families in apartments.

Everything started to shift to the young professional couple.

ANDREA: You go down Georgia Avenue now, on either side of the street condos, condos, condos.

NATALIE: You started seeing enormous amounts of money being put into real estate in D.C. DAN: Every single vacant house started getting gut renovated, and then the prices of the homes became exorbitant, and the only people that could move into these homes were predominantly young and white.

CHAPELLE: D.C. has changed.

It's different now.

It's... (laughter) There's a lot of white people walking around, isn't it?

(laughter) NARRATOR: As the decade progressed, the pace of change picked up.

ANDY: Anthony Williams and other folks saw Washington, D.C., as a depressed market and wanted to open it up as wide as possible.

Probably they underestimated how quickly that change was going to take shape.

HOPKINSON: By mid-2000s, it was clear that it had worked.

There wasn't really a need to continue to hit the gas.

CLINTON: A lot of people also willingly left because the money was worth it.

Sometimes, you just can't afford to say no if somebody's trying to buy you out.

NARRATOR: For more clips and to watch the full program visit weta.org/decades.