In 2011, the development group scraped away the last vestiges of the 1.2-million-square-foot City Center. The nearly empty shopping mall, which opened in 1989 but struggled as interest in downtown shopping declined, was replaced by Columbus Commons, a $25 million expanse of grass, gardens and a shaded food court inspired by Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan.

The same year, the city rebuilt its eastern Scioto River shoreline, shrinking a five-lane riverfront boulevard to three lanes, and adding a promenade and restaurants. The renamed Scioto Mile cost $44 million.

Columbus then looked at the river itself, listless and muddy. In 2013, the city removed the Main Street Dam, which was completed in 1918 to control flooding but also doubled to 600 feet the distance between the river’s banks. With the dam out of the way, and with the help of dredges to remove sediments, the river narrowed to 300 feet, and the city gained 33 acres of once-submerged shoreline that opened as the $36 million Scioto Greenways park last year. The projects were principally financed by public funds.

Columbus’s strategy of seeding anticipated private real estate investment with taxpayer money defied the tactics of low taxes and public spending austerity that gripped Ohio’s state lawmakers through and since the recession. But city officials say their decisions have paid off, attracting developers into privately financing the replacement of cracked asphalt of parking lots with nearly $350 million in new and renovated market-rate buildings that house thousands of downtown residents, and helped generate 1,000 jobs.

The newest completed project in the southern part of downtown is 250 High Street, a $55 million, 12-story building on the southwest corner of Columbus Commons. It is 320,000 square feet, and has about 120 rental units and retail and office space. Opened in November, it has 140,000 square feet of office space and 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space. Over all, it is 99 percent leased.

The market response has been so strong that the builders — Robert White Jr., the president of the developer the Daimler Group, and Brett Kaufman, the chief executive of Kaufman Development — are preparing to construct a $60 million, mixed-use building of similar size on an empty parcel a block away.