I don’t know that it is or is not a “general” feeling. It probably depends on whether you have always lived in a city or inner suburb and notice no change in your life (since the population density in your neighborhood has not changed in 40 years) or whether you are in one of the outer suburbs or exurbia watching the metropolitan area encroach on your life or whether you have had to become accustomed to one-hour or two-hour (each way) commutes to work as traffic has overloaded freeways designed for 1950s traffic and jury-rigged to handle 1970s traffic.
Where I was born in Royal Oak MI, the neighborhood has hardly changed in over 50 years, “suffering” the addition of one (12-unit) apartment house to replace two older homes and a vacant lot. Where I grew up in Rochester, MI, the orchard across the road from my subdivision (we were on the early wave of suburban expansion) has been replaced by condos and the fields and farms (both dairy and meat cattle) past which I biked as a kid were replaced by housing tracts and condos over 20 years ago and Avon Township incorporated as Rochester Hills.
My In-laws are from Howell, MI and in the 23 years we’ve been married, I have seen that town with 1 1/2 supermarkets surrounded by active farms be replaced by four major shopping centers (the original WalMart had to sell its original building and build a much larger outlet in the center across the highway because they did not have the floor space to hold what they could sell), and houses on paved roads out where trhe gravel raods had been impenetrable in the Spring rains just a few years ago.
In the southern tier of Geauga County, where I live, the opening of a freeway has changed the township closest to metro Cleveland from a place with two family operated pizza outlets, one supermarket in a small shopping center, a K-Mart, and a Big Wheel to a place with two major supermarkets, nine pizza outlets (four of them chains), three small shopping centers and two huge shopping centers (WalMart, Target, Home Depot, Circuit City, Kohl’s, etc.), three medical clinics, two additional (large) schools–one of which has already been expanded–and housing developments on every corner–and the freeway only opened in 1993.
I don’t think that the country is overcrowded, but we are sure sprawling across a lot of countryside.