I feel like I missed something. Why is it that off-street parking must be subterranean? Is it more expensive to make the building a floor of two taller and use the first floors for parking? Is this illegal somehow?
Perhaps a ring of stores, with the interior of the first floor or two as a parking garage, which are less desirable anyway?
Turning radiuses and building services (elevators, water, sewerage, cooling, electrical) limit the ability to restrict parking to interior cores, though automated parking systems might allow for this.
Utilizing interior cores for warehousing/storage might also make some level of sense. I've also seen numerous buildings with large interior multi-floor (often the full building height) atria -- some quite beautiful in fact.
You can see the garage entrance to the left, and the garage wraps around behind the main entrance (a five story open air atrium) to the right hand side. It doesn't have to be hideous.
Nobody cares what this building looks like because nobody would walk to or past it because it's in the middle of nowhere and there are literally no sidewalks.
This article is about a real city where people walk to things. Here is a picture of it. https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=ballard+seattle&data=...
Correlation != causation.
You can also directly compare regions in which monoliths break the flow small/frequent storefronts. The relationship, in my casual observation, holds very strongly.
You can disrupt the pattern by providing street-level temporary equivalents, e.g., street fairs / farmer's markets, and the like.
And obxkcd: http://xkcd.com/552/
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."